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It may be pleasant to think that the economies that are “on top” now will stay on top forever, but it is doubtful that this is the way the economy of the world works.
Figure 1 shows that, for the Advanced Economies viewed as a group (that is, members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)), GDP has been trending downward since the early 1960s; this is concerning. It makes it look as if within only a few years, the Advanced Economies might be in permanent shrinkage. In 2022, the expected annual GDP growth rate for the group seems to be only 1%.
What is even more concerning is the fact that the indications in the graph are based on a period when the debt of the Advanced Economies was growing. This growing debt acted as an economic stimulus; it helped the industries manufacturing goods and services as well as the citizens buying the goods and services. Without this stimulus, GDP growth would no doubt appear to be falling even faster than shown.
In this post, I will look at underlying factors that relate to this downward trend, including oil consumption growth and changes in interest rate policies. I will also discuss the Maximum Power Principle of biology. Based on this principle, the world economy seems to be headed for a major reorganization. In this reorganization, the Advanced Countries seem likely to lose their status as world leaders. Such a downfall could happen through a loss at war, or it could happen in other ways.
[1] The major factor in the downward trend in GDP growth seems to be the loss of growth of oil supply.
In the 1940 to 1970 period, the price of oil was very low (less than $20 per barrel at today’s prices), and oil supply growth was 7% to 8% per year, which is very rapid. The US was the dominant user of oil in this era, allowing the US to become the world’s leading country both in a military way (hegemony), and in a financial way, as the holder of the “reserve currency.”
Data on year-by-year oil consumption growth is not available for the earliest years, but we can view the trend over 10-year periods (Figure 2).
With the rapid growth in the world oil supply in the 1940 to 1970 timeframe, the US was able to help Europe and Japan rebuild their infrastructure after World War II. The US also did a great deal of building at home, including adding electricity transmission lines, oil and gas pipelines, and interstate highways. It also added a Medicare program to provide healthcare for the elderly. The emphasis at this time was on building for the future.
In the 1960s, the Green Revolution was started, aimed at increasing the quantity of food produced. This revolution involved greater mechanization of farming, the use of hybrid seeds that required more fertilizer, the use of genetically modified seeds, and the use of herbicides and pesticides. With these changes, farming became increasingly dependent on oil and other fossil fuels. The green revolution led to lower inflation-adjusted prices for food, as well as greater supply.
The 1970s was a time of adaptation to spiking oil prices and declining growth in oil supplies. At the same time, wages were increasing, and more women were entering the workforce, making the rise in oil prices more tolerable. There were also advances in computerization, changing the nature of many kinds of work.
The 1980s marked a shift to an emphasis on how to get costs down for the consumer. There was more emphasis on competition and leverage (the euphemism for borrowing). Instead of building for the future, the emphasis was on using previously built infrastructure for as long as possible.
Also in the 1980s, the Advanced Economies started to shift toward becoming service economies. To do this, a significant share of manufacturing and mining was moved to lower-wage countries. Transferring a significant share of industry abroad had the additional benefit of holding down prices for the consumer.
[2] Oil consumption growth and GDP growth seem to be connected.
Figure 3 shows that oil consumption growth was higher than GDP growth up until 1973, when oil prices started to spike. This was the period of greatly adding to infrastructure, using the abundant oil supply, as discussed in Section [1]
After 1973-1974, GDP growth tended to stay slightly above oil consumption growth as Advanced Economies started to focus on becoming service economies. As part of this shift, Advanced Economies began moving industry to lower-wage countries. This shift became more pronounced after 1997, when the Kyoto Protocol (limiting CO2 emissions) was promulgated. The Kyoto Protocol gave participating countries (in practice, the Advanced Economies) a reason to hold down their own local consumption of fossil fuels, which is what is measured in Figure 3 and most other energy analyses.
Figure 3 shows that even after moving a significant share of industry to offshore locations, there still seems to be a significant correlation between oil consumption growth and GDP growth. Even with a service economy, oil consumption growth seems to be important!
[3] Prior to 1981, increasing interest rates were used to slow economic growth.
With the rapid growth in oil consumption in the 1940 to 1970 period, the economy often grew rapidly despite rising interest rates. After World War II, government loans became available to returning veterans to buy homes, helping to make the usage of oil affordable.
It was only as growth in oil consumption slowed and interest rates rose to a high level in the 1979-1981 period that high interest rates created a major recession. At such high interest rates, builders of all kinds were discouraged from building. Hardly anyone could afford a new home. Businesses couldn’t afford new factories, and governments couldn’t afford to build new schools. Few people could afford new car loans.
On Figure 3, it is not surprising that GDP dipped at the same time as oil consumption shortly after 1981. The dip in oil consumption was larger because heavy users of oil, such as construction and manufacturing, were squeezed out by the high interest rates.
[4] Falling interest rates in the period 1981 to 2020, as shown in Figure 4, stimulated the economy in many ways.
The 1981 to 2020 period marked a time of generally falling interest rates, with short term interest rates typically being below long-term interest rates. Reducing interest rates tends to stimulate the economy in a variety of ways:
(a) As we all know, lower interest rates make monthly payments on new home mortgages lower. This means that more citizens can afford to purchase homes, leading to greater demand for new homes and their furnishings. Prices of homes tend to rise, partly because people with a given income can afford larger, fancier homes, and partly because more people in total can afford homes.
(b) Even on existing home mortgages, new lower rates can have an impact. In the US, mortgages are frequently set for a long term, such as 20 years, but they can often be refinanced at a lower rate if interest rates fall lower. In many other countries and in the US for business property, mortgage rates are set for a shorter term, such as 5 years. As the loans renew, the new lower rates become available. Borrowers are happy; there is suddenly a smaller monthly payment for the same property.
(c) With lower interest rates, there is demand for more homes to be built. This stimulates the construction industry and helps the prices of all kinds of built structures rise.
(d) A similar situation to (a), (b) and (c) exists for all kinds of items normally purchased using loans. New cars, new boats, and new second homes are affected, as are many kinds of business loans. Even loans taken out by governmental organizations become less expensive. It suddenly becomes easier to buy goods, so more goods are sold. Market prices can be higher because at the new lower interest rates, more people can afford them.
(e) There can be some benefit with respect to long-term bond holdings, if interest rates fall. Bonds generally promise to pay a stated interest rate over the life of the bond, say 20 years. If the market interest rate falls, the selling price of a high coupon-rate long-term bond increases because such bonds are worth more than a similar new bond with a lower coupon interest rate.
Financial institutions such as banks, insurance companies, pension plans, and endowment funds generally have long-term bonds as part of their portfolios. The higher value of bonds may or may not be reflected in financial statements, depending on the accounting rules applied. Sometimes, “amortized cost” is used as the carrying value until the bond is sold, hiding the gain in value. Conversely, if bonds are “marked to market,” then the higher value becomes immediately reported in financial statements.
(f) With mark-to-market accounting, insurance companies, banks and many other kinds of financial organizations can reflect the benefit immediately. As a result, for example, insurance companies may be able to sell policies more cheaply in a falling interest rate environment. (Of course, as interest rates start rising, the opposite is true. I believe that is part of the problem with the spike in insurance rates that the world has been witnessing in the past two years. But this is seldom mentioned because it is less well understood.)
(g) With falling interest rates, practically all kinds of asset prices rise. For example, the prices of shares of stock tend to rise, as does the price of farmland. Prices of office buildings tend to rise. People feel richer. They can sell some of their investments and profit from the sale. Tax rates on long-term capital gains are low in the US, further helping investors.
(h) If generally falling interest rates can be maintained for many years (1981 to 2020), gambling in the stock market starts looking like a great idea. Investment using borrowed funds looks like it makes sense. Buying derivatives seems to make sense. Adding more and more leverage makes sense. People rich enough to gamble in the stock market or the housing market begin to gain huge advantages over the many poor people whose wages remain too low to buy more than the basics.
These advantages tend to drive a wider and wider wedge between the rich and the poor. As diminishing returns become more of a problem, wage and wealth disparities become increasingly major issues. These disparities arise partly because of competition with low-wage countries for less-skilled jobs, and partly because of the need to pay higher wages to highly educated workers. They also arise because owners of shares of stock and of homes have tended to receive the benefit of significant capital gains as interest rates have fallen, for the reasons described above.
[5] Since 2020, interest rates have begun to rise in the Advanced Economies. It is difficult to see how a shift to higher interest rates can turn out well.
News write-ups about the rise in interest rates often say something like the following:
The Fed hiked interest rates a total of 11 times between March 2022 and January 2024, making borrowing more expensive for banks, businesses, and people in an attempt to curb rampant inflation.
However, Figure 4 shows that long-term interest rates (the blue line) started to rise much earlier than this–about the time the US started to borrow a huge amount of money to support the programs it initiated to keep the economy functioning at the time of the Covid restrictions in 2020.
This funding went back into the economy to provide income to would-be workers who were forced to stay home and to small businesses that needed additional funds to cover their overhead. Pauses in student loan repayments had a similar effect. At the same time, fewer goods and services were created because non-essential activities were restricted.
This combination of more wealth in the hands of citizens at the same time as a limited quantity of goods and services were being produced was precisely the right combination of actions needed to generate inflation. So, it was no wonder that there was an inflation problem.
Indirectly, high US borrowing has been, and continues to be, part of the inflation problem. Total goods and services produced in the world economy are not currently rising very quickly because diesel and jet fuel are in short supply, something I wrote about here and here. The US and other Advanced Economies keep issuing more debt in the hope that using this debt will help them purchase a larger share of the goods and services produced by the world economy.
It is not clear to me that this problem can be fixed since the US and the other Advanced Economies need to keep borrowing to support their economies and to fight for causes such as the Ukraine War. Note the downward trend in Figure 1!
One of the big problems with high asset prices and higher-than-zero interest rates is that farmers find that the cost of their land becomes too high to make it worthwhile to grow crops. This is especially the case for new farmers, who may need to buy their land using the higher-cost debt.
People often believe that farm prices will rise indefinitely, but Reuters reports that high borrowing costs and low food prices are cutting demand for farm equipment from John Deere, the world’s largest manufacturer of agricultural machinery. Without a flow of new farm equipment to replace that which is breaking or worn out, food production can be expected to fall.
Another issue is that apartment owners find a need to raise the rent on their units if the interest rate they are forced to pay rises or if the cost of property insurance rises. If they raise the rent of their units, this leaves renters with less income for other goods and services. Indirectly, today’s wage and wealth disparity problems tend to become greater than they were before the rise in interest rates.
In theory, if long-term (not just short-term) interest rates rise and remain higher, the many benefits of falling interest rates in Section [4] will be erased, and even reversed. The economy will be far worse off than it is now because of falling asset prices and defaulting debt. Financial institutions, such as banks and insurance companies, will be especially damaged because the true value of their long-term bonds will tend to fall. This can sometimes be hidden by accounting approaches, but ultimately unrealized capital losses will cause a problem as they did for Silicon Valley Bank.
The heavy use of debt and leveraging in the Advanced Economies makes these economies especially vulnerable to major financial problems if interest rates rise, or even if they stay at the current level. The bubble of debt and other promises (such as pensions promises) holding up the Advanced Economies seems vulnerable to collapse.
[6] The problem facing the people of the Advanced Economies is like the problem the biological world often faces.
The biological world is constantly faced with the problem of too many animals (for example, wolves and deer) wanting to occupy a given space with specific resources, such as water, sunlight, and smaller plants and animals to eat. In some sense, the world economy is an ecosystem, too, one that we humans have made. The Advanced Economies are already in a conflict with the less advanced economies, trying to decide which parts of the world will “win” in the battle over the resources needed for future economic growth.
The Maximum Power Principle (MPP) tries to explain who can be expected to be the winners and losers in an ecosystem when there are not enough resources to go around. I think of the MPP as an extension of the “survival of the fittest” or “survival of the best adapted.” The difference is that MPP looks at the functioning of the overall system, which, in this case, is the world economy.
The parts of the system (such as the individual people, the levels of borrowing, the government organizations, and the narratives governments choose to tell to explain the current situation) will be selected based on how well they permit the overall world economy (not just the Advanced Economies) to function. The goal seems to be to create as many goods and services as possible by dissipating all available energy in as useful a way as possible. In this way, the world GDP, which is a measure of the output of the useful work performed by the world economy, can stay as high as possible, for each time period.
Writings by scientists on this subject tend to be difficult to understand, but they may add some insight. One definition of MPP says that systems which maximize their flow of energy survive in competition. Mark Brown, professor emeritus at the University of Florida, says that under the Maximum Power Principle, “System components are selectively reinforced based on their contribution to the larger systems within which they are embedded,” and, “When resources are in short supply, they need to be used efficiently.” John Delong from the University of New Mexico says, “Winning species were successfully predicted a priori from their status as the species with the highest power when alone.”
I suggest that if these principles are applied to the competition between the Advanced Economies and the less advanced economies of the world, the Advanced Economies will lose. For example, the Advanced Economies have been falling behind the less advanced economies in industrial output.
In addition, the Advanced Economies of the world have fallen behind in the bidding for oil supplies:
Furthermore, the NATO allies seem unable to pull ahead of Russia in the Ukraine conflict. In theory, this should have been an easy war to win, but with limited manufacturing capability, it has been hard for the allies to provide enough weapons of the right kinds to win.
To me, this all points to the conclusion that in a conflict over scarce resources, the Advanced Economies are likely to lose. The conflict could come in the form of war, or it could simply be a financial conflict. Figure 1 shows that the Advanced Economies are already falling behind in the competition for economic growth, even with all the debt they are adding.
[7] There is a lot of confusion about what is ahead.
We don’t know what is ahead. The economy is a self-organizing system that seems to figure out its own way of resolving the problem of not enough resources to go around because of diminishing returns. The world economy seems to be headed toward reorganization.
I believe that the Covid-19 era represented one rather strange self-organized response to the “not enough oil to go around” problem. Figure 6 shows a clear dip in the amount of oil consumed in 2020, particularly by the Advanced Economies. Some of this reduced oil consumption continues, even now, because more people started working from home, saving on oil. Another helpful change was a huge ramp-up in the use of online meetings.
It is possible that new adaptations to limited oil supply may appear in as strange a way as the Covid-19 era did.
Another possibility is that the Advanced Economies, particularly the US, will encounter severe financial problems as the rest of the world moves away from the US dollar. Or the problem could be falling asset prices because of higher interest rates, causing many financial institutions to fail. Or the problem could be too much money being printed, but practically nothing to buy, causing severe inflation of commodity prices.
War may be a possibility because it is an age-old way of dealing with resource problems. For one thing, it becomes easy to raise debt to pay for a war. This debt can be used to hire soldiers and buy munitions. With the higher debt, the GDP of the economy can be expected to suddenly look better because of the stimulus given to it. The major “catch” is that picking a fight with a major competitor or two could prove to be disastrous.
Let us hope that our leaders make wise choices and keep us away from severe problems for as long as possible.
Suspect most here are old boomers…but for younger folks collapse is already here
The Future Doesn’t Seem Bright Anymore…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0DB3t0d03H4
@travisbplank
36 year old millenial here. Just want to say that it only gets worse. Don’t waste your time on work. There is nothing worth having that can be gained that way. Ive been working and saving my whole life and every time i get close to buying a house, inflation hits, or the jobs disappear or whatever. My best friend died and I realized ive done nothing but work for other people and I have NOTHING to show for it. Nothing of value, anyway. It’s not worth it. Love people, follow your passions. Go mad and risk starvation. Suppreasing yourself for the sake of the job is not worth it. You’ll probably fail, but at least you will have TRIED for something you actually want instead of failing at something you feel you SHOULD want.
bardofhighrenown
I feel this. Modern life is so lonely and it feels like it’s impossible to find people to connect with or who even want to try to connect. The possibility of home ownership, starting a family and even retirement are slipping away and it makes working feel like a waste of time. So many people are working to pay for things they need in order to go to work. It’s a cycle of working in order to keep working. I also feel lost and I don’t know what to do about it.
And we expect them to support us in our retirement.. haha 🤣
King Louis XV of France was an unremarkable monarch. Squeezed between two more famous Louises, he was relatively unknown. His mistress, Madame de Pompadour, was much better known than him.
However, he did leave a famous quote, Après moi, le déluge (After me, the Deluge).
Although he was not a bright man, he noticed something nasty was coming, and he also sensed it would not be in his lifetime.
Frankly speaking, other than some people who still believe in delusions, most of the people here are just waiting to see what will happen in the end, hoping that our lifespans do not hit the horrors which are more and more visible every day.
My three axioms of government:
1.) It always gets bigger.
2.) There is never enough money.
3.) The government will do whatever it takes to get more money.
Go look at some China podcasts. I don’t know how accurate or hyped gloom and doom these e.g., are
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkSOfrqiYYs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_dvIqQo2FM
compared to Kevin Walmsley’s videos where he seems to think China is going strong and implies China will crush the world economically.
We know that governments are dissipative structures. As such, they need energy, including that purchased using borrowed money, so we shouldn’t be too surprised if China is running into problems. In fact, it probably was already running into problems in 2019, when covid first broke out in the country.
The first video involves the fall-off of tourist trade in the coastal city of Xiamen, ostensibly because of past price gouging. I can believe this is happening. If finances are strained, a cutback in tourism is likely. Tourist places were likely giving bad deals previously, because they too were finding their finances were stretches.
The second video is about the huge amount of debt entered into by local governments, and the fact that t his debt has reached the point of becoming impossible to repay. In fact, it is hard to even figure out how much debt is out there. This doesn’t surprise me. I have heard about this issue before. Now, with things going down hill, there really needs to be some sort of debt jubilee to keep the system going. But I don’t know how this would affect the overall system.
In China, the restless unemployed youth say
“Lie flat.” Don’t bother working, trying to get a house, get married etc. There’s no future.
The other expression is “Let it rot.”
Some will do that, that is biology.
Dennis L.
As a 32-year-old millennial, I can totally relate to these feelings.
I can feel the pulse of the economy fading.
The profit machine is stuck despite the robust injections of liquidity created out of thin air.
As we know, economic growth only means burning fuel, increasing the energy consumption to produce and sell more things to everyone. And knowing that growth depends on the abundance of cheap fossil energy, and that the latter is on the path to decline, doesn’t help. Knowledge is truly a curse.
I have always thought that the choice remains individual, everyone must understand and decide for themselves, but one cannot think of creating a happy island (such as an isolated and independent house maximized for self-sufficiency) while everything else falls in ruin, also because “the hordes” of desperate people will sooner or later attack your happy island too.
I think that if we want to have a residue for future prosperity, people will have to understand and accept that the Western lifestyle is on the way out.
However, I do not expect the majority of the people to accept it willingly.
The next 10 years will be the so-called “interesting times”, unfortunately.
Diesen had a podcast regarding his latest book and in that cast mentioned the death of religion.
Religion gives organization to personal life, it gives a set of rules.
Per Diesen, and I am approximating, government is for the group, religion is for the individual.
You will have to listen to find this idea, sorry.
Really? This was in the NYT? I haven’t come across any other reference to this:
Biden Told Ally That He Is Weighing Whether to Continue in the Race
english.almanar.com.lb/2144936
Thanks for all the comment on Werner. I’m going to chew through it and particularly some of your links, kind Postkey, and will post a response. Probably, I guess on the next page.
In your reference, I found this interesting:
“Mr. Biden is slowly reaching out to Democratic elected officials and has a meeting with Democratic governors at the White House scheduled for Wednesday evening.”
Right now is Wednesday evening in the time zone that Washington D. C. is in. So, it seems to be right about now a decision is being made.
Yea he is going to step down t they realized they can’t fool people anymore. Harris announcement soon
I can understand the reasoning Smith gives:
https://alt-market.us/americans-are-more-likely-to-go-to-war-with-the-government-than-submit-to-the-draft/
Americans Are More Likely To Go To War With The Government Than Submit To The Draft by Brandon Smith
90% of the Gen Z-ers would already have PTSD before the end of the first week of boot camp.
They have PTSD already just from the Trump presidency.
Of policies, which one most caused you disagreement?
Dennis L.
In 2018?
“By the time you got to the first Bush administration, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they came out with a national defense policy and strategic policy. What they basically said is that we’re going to have wars against what they called much weaker enemies and these have to be carried out quickly and decisively or else there will be embarrassment—a way of saying that popular reaction is going to set in. And that’s the way it’s been. It’s not pretty, but it’s some kind of constraint. “?
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/03/noam-chomsky-populist-groundswell-u-s-elections-future-humanity.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29
What can be expected, if charging stations are unmanned and have easy to get to copper in their cables? This is only one of the obstacles with respect to making money from these devices.
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/seattle-thieves-targeting-ev-charging-stations-has-reached-epidemic-proportions
Thieves In Seattle Targeting EV Charging Stations Has Reached “Epidemic Proportions”
It seems like by the time you get the wire find a buyer and drive… you could get a job and make more money?!?! Probably only paying $15 per hour
Sam, you are clearly a square.
The people who steal copper are addicts or mental cases who can’t hold down even a min.-wage job, or those of a criminal bent who simply don’t want to. Freelance thievery makes sense for them. No 9-5 fixed hours, no background checks, no taxes, W-2s, etc.
When McDonald’s is paying $14/hr pretax, with all the hassle of managers and customers harshing your mellow, this could be a reasonable alternative.
I read a comment recently from a maintenance guy working in Section-8 housing (US low-income gov. voucher system). He said he got paid $20/hr. to repair all the apartments where plumbing and wiring had been ripped out by the tenants.
OUTRAGEOUS NEED FOR OUTLETS: CABLE THEFTS SPARKED IN AMERICA BY STUPID LACK OF SOCKETS
JUNE 12, 2024 DAVI OTTENHEIMER
https://www.flyingpenguin.com/?p=58492
I’ve said it for years and I’ll say it again, electric vehicle charging should primarily be done with sockets. Make the owner of a car bring a cable. It’s basic electricity infrastructure design, and sockets are 100 years old, as old as electric cars.
….Tesla bothered to invent their own plug, to push the country to adapt to their charging station design, but ignored the actual problems that would destroy it all? The sheer stupidity of Tesla engineering management never ceases to amaze me.
To make an even finer point. Tesla literally took the Mennekes products, switched them to permanent cables that could be stolen or damaged, and slapped a Tesla logo on top when deploying centralized stations ripe for crime. The American electric vehicle market would be far better off without any Tesla.
Not that I care and this EV scam is best derailed ASAP
Good point!
One assumes people not stealing things is the problem?
This does not speak well of us.
Dennis L.
as i understand it….you cant fast charge an ev without a big fat copper cable, not always practical to carry one of those around
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR2tk9TcsDM
This video discusses the brain drain of Chinese students, researchers, and scientists leaving the USA for China. I observed this myself … people coming here to top research programs, doing their PhD or postdoc, and then returning to job offers in China. Apparently now India is the top provider of foreign talent in US universities, reflecting the US pivot towards India.
oops Dennis already posted this
Good riddance. Let them mess up China.
The ‘scientists’ from India are good on bullshitting and since they don’t do any actual work they don’t harm civ as much as the Chinese.
The guy who brought rockets to China
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSvvF8EKpJY
If he and his family and students who returned to PRC were all lobotomized before boarding the plane to Peking, we would have won Vietnam.
kul,
Have you done the basic three? Calc I, II, III? It can be done, but takes effort.
Dennis L.
TM has a new post out.
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/
“The essence of globalization was the driving of a wedge between consumption and production. The idea was that Westerners would carry on consuming at or above historic levels, whilst production (and associated well-paid employment) was outsourced to the East.”
My guess: essence is a group skimming the difference, main driving force. A one shot, no follow on act.
Dennis L.
I think that this is one of Tim Morgan’s better articles.
When I responded to Moss earlier, I mentioned two of the ways that the US works around higher interest rates. When I read this article, I thought of a third way–Monetary expansion–by governments spending far more than they collect in taxes. They increase their own debt, and thus they increase the money supply. They may also do tricks to try to keep interest rates down.
Quite a bit of the government produced money goes to big corporations–making military supplies, or installing wind turbines or solar panels, or adding capacity to the electric grid. Some of it trickles down to ordinary workers, but not very much. As Tim points out, this makes low wage people unhappy. They become willing to vote for far right candidates.
Part of what Tim Morgan is saying is this:
At the end of the article, Morgan describes the current situation this way:
“the responses of those driving the economy can be likened to pressing the accelerator hard to the metal as the wall of reality draws nearer.”
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/saudi-energy-minister-announces-discovery-multiple-oil-gas-fields-2024-07-01/
Some new oil and gas fields, even unconventional, were discovered in Saudi Arabia.
The volumes of the discoveries, the type of reservoir, the type of oil, well all the important informations are unknown.
Gotta keep the morale up .
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Global-Crude-Oil-Shipments-Fall-in-June-on-Saudi-Export-Slump.html
Yes, I can believe that Saudi exports fell in June because they need to use more oil for air conditioning at this time of year. I would think that they would use natural gas instead, but they have a lot of oil-based electricity generation available if they needed it. Bloomberg data is likely to be reasonably good.
Self-reported data in JODI, quoted in the latter part of the article, I would tend to take with “a grain of salt.” It may or may not be right. OPEC doesn’t use self-reported Saudi data for a reason.
https://jpt.spe.org/saudi-oil-basins-rich-and-complex
This is a 4 year old article of the Society of petroleum engineers that mentioned some of the geological formations that would have gone into production within a few years.
One is the tight gas formation, the Jafurah basin, that now we know that there are around 200 trillion cubic feet of gas in place, and we know now that the development is ongoing.
There is also a lot of tight gas under the big, old Ghawar.
What I found really interesting is the mention of this “oil sand” formation (like the Canadian ones or is it just a tight sandstone reservoir? who knows…) in the north of the country:
“He showed a cross section of a play in northern Saudi Arabia where an extremely thick reservoir was broken by many faults. High-resolution imaging and modeling is required to target oil sands in this complex formation.”
It seems that there is a lot of oil potential but it is more and more complicated to get hydrocarbon molecules out of the ground.
More and more complicated = more and more expensive
Oil sands can be expected to give a lot of diesel and jet fuel, but their cost of extraction tends to be high. It is hard to make an adequate profit extracting them. Russia’s oil tends to be heavy; it is dealing with the low profit issue too.
A very small field may not even be worth building out, I expect. This is especially true for natural gas. Natural gas sells for a very low price. If it is far from the ocean, it will require a long pipeline, plus purification facilities, if it is to be of any use.
Inside China Business:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR2tk9TcsDM
Intellectual capital.
Graphs are presented. Racism is mentioned, that means against Chinese, etc. They are going home.
This site is mostly concerned with stuff, it somewhat ignores intellectual capital.
Note on migration at around 9:00, summary, US is getting the least talented, most talented are returning home.
Life is now very demanding; it is not always fair and accountants might not be the best to run technical companies. A certain aircraft manufacture is finding it challenging to get back from the International Space Station.
Dennis L.
This is a good video. Engineers who want to see their designs put to use, and get compensated for what they do, want to go to China.
The US is increasingly putting up barriers to outsourcing production to China. But the US can’t really produce much of anything without supply chains that run everywhere.
The big effect of all of the policies of Democrats to given an equal opportunity to all has been to increase the opportunities of Blacks and make it much more difficult for the Chinese to be admitted to top universities. I can see why the Chinese would be angry.
Until Joseph Needham published Science and Civilization in China, not one person living in there bothered to catalogue all the technology that country had created.
What usually happened is
Some guy invents something
The local magistrate doesn’t like it
It is buried, only recorded in some guy’s memoir (equivalent to a blog)
Buried until Joseph Needham found it many centuries later.
The Chinese was happy to regurgitate the words of Confucious and his disciples all the way to 1902. They will gladly go back to such ways without western input.
The west does NOT need them.
I have said this quite a few times – the proper thing to do to Srinivasa Ramanujan was not admitting him to the Royal Society, making it a bad joke which made people from proper backgrounds to avoid science and engineering, but to break his head, dice his brains and make a good bowl of curry with it.
Fermi put a Chien-Hsiung Wu as his assistant. She made some minor contribution here and there, but not that important to be remembered for posterity. Her husband was a grandson of a famous Chinese warlord so while he was a nobody in USA he had some recognition in China.
After Wu died in 1997 her husband and entire remaining family returned to the Mainland China.
In my reply to ivanislav I cited the sorry case of Chien Hsueh-sen, who should have been lobotomized before being allowed back to PRC.
In the end, Asians do not contribute anything to the civilization built by westerners. Whatever they do in Asia, let the Asians enjoy whatever fruits they might create, and given their looooong track record of doing nothing, it is probable that Asia in 2100 will look like what it looked like in 1900.
Actually, Chinese make very good engineers. I have run into quite a few Chinese actuaries, too. We don’t see many Chinese in Public Relations, however.
Mme Wu did discover violation of parity in nuclear decays. A Nobel prize worthy discovery, even though she did not get it. Granted had Fermi stayed alive, according to his disciple Segre’, he was already after this line of research 8 years prior. So she was worse than Fermi but better than all the anglo-chews she was surrounded by.
“In March, Nature published a review of research confirming brain inflammation from Covid as a key cause of memory and concentration problems. Your immune system triggers inflammation. There’s also evidence of direct infection that can age your brain. Scientific American published an overview of studies documenting Covid’s cognitive impact. They’ve shown that Covid survivors routinely face the following:
Cognitive deficits
Memory problems
Prolonged brain inflammation
Fused brain cells
Brain shrinkage . . .
Covid attacks your immune system.
A study by the disease-forecasting firm Airfinity confirmed what many experts have been saying for years now, that at least a dozen diseases ranging from measles to tuberculosis “are surging past their pre-pandemic levels in many regions.” A study in Family Medicine and Community Health found that Covid infections have made children five and younger much more vulnerable to respiratory infections like RSV. As they conclude, “COVID-19 contributed to the 2022 surge of RSV cases in young children through the large buildup of COVID-19-infected children and the potential long-term adverse effects of COVID-19 on the immune and respiratory system.”
The drug manufacturer Merck now lists Covid as the third most common cause of lymphocytopenia, right behind HIV.”?
https://www.okdoomer.io/everything-that-friend-wants-you-to-know-about-covid/
Well, they should have got the vaccine.
Why would that have helped?
The injectable products attack the immune system even more effectively than the virus does, don’t they?
That’s the whole point of their design, isn’t it? According to the official story?
Inject billions and billions of synthetic viroid lipid nanoparticles into the body, bypassing all the usual defenses, and see how many muscle cells they can enter and how big an immune response they can stimulate?
In the hope that the stimulation will enhance the immune defense against the virus if it shows up later?
While at the same time hoping that not too many of the little LNP buggers get into the bloodstream and enter cells that buggers up the immune system and triggers an immune response that causes blood clots, inflammation of important organs, myocarditis, cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Lou Gehrig’s, Hashimoto’s or sudden and unexpected dropping down dead—just like that?
Every research on the the effects of Covid should differentiate between people vaccinated and not.
And among people vaccinated, if with mRNA or not and how many doses.
If these variables are absent, the research respect the definition I studied on Statistics during University:
“garbage in, garbage out”.
“The data itself shows no reduction in covid or death”
The last American vagabond video at 27:57 :
28:00 “These spike proteins cross the blood brain barrier. . . . They have prion disease effects. We are going to see this in about a year and a half.”
39:50: the outcomes of these prion diseases. The data shows that it is a problem for both {the virus and particularly the vaccine} ?
https://www.flemingmethod.com/select-videos
That was a rather extended link on lymphocytopenia. Everything you want to know about COVID…..no surprise , it’s responsible for everything…
We need better vaccines. We need better tests. We need better wastewater tracking. We need more people wearing good masks. We need our governments to subsidize mask manufacturers instead of passing mask bans. We need public investment in clean air. We need local governments to use our tax money on air purifiers and upgraded HVAC instead of cop cities. We need more funding for Long Covid research. If Trump wins, then we will get absolutely none of these things. Ever. Millions of people feel deeply alienated over the current administration’s Covid response. They would be more likely to vote if they believed, for a second, that people cared about them.
I was impressed by all the study links that back up their assertions with solid research…I’m all in …just had blood work done and believe it or not I have
low white blood count…lymphocytopenia? From COVID?
I have a follow up with the Doc..just a coincidence
I’m sorry to hear that diagnosis. I hope you can find some way to remedy it, regardless of how you came to get it.
Millions of people feel deeply alienated, period. And I for one don’t blame them.
Was this your first test indicating lympthocyopenia? Could you have had it for a longer time without knowing? How were your previous blood tests?
I don’t visit the doctor much, but I usually have a blood and urine test done every year or two, so I can see how much I’m falling apart, give the authorities some data to keep them happy, and stay on good terms with the doc in case I need their help sometime.
For psychological reasons, I feel this need more now that I’m of pensionable age.
So far, the white blood cell count has always been well within “normal” levels, touch wood.
Well, I skipped it, you guys may not have had all the right conclusions, but the direction was approximately right.
Dennis L.
What is covid?
“What is covid?”
It was a terrible plague that killed millions worldwide and even some astronauts on the space station. One day in 2021 I had to step over two thousand and seventeen dead bodies just to get to my local shop. And when I got there, the shop was closed anyway, and a sign in the window said, “Sorry. We’re dead”.
Ukraine may be defaulting on its debt on August 1, which is less than a month away. Alex talks about the possible default at 13:20 in this video. According to Alex, the plan was to not only win in Ukraine, but also engineer regime change in Russia. With regime change in Russia, the hope was to gain access to the wealth of Russia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP4n9el6Zt8
The Reuters article says (on June 19):
https://www.reuters.com/world/how-much-money-does-ukraine-owe-whom-2024-06-13/
It sounds like the amount coming due in August for Ukraine will be less than the $50 billion of loans hoped for, so that this (act of theft) might temporarily solve the problem, if I understand the situation, but it is not clear that I do.
The Economist is writing about this issue, as well.
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/06/30/ukraine-has-a-month-to-avoid-default
We will probably be hearing more about the outcome of the debt situation in Ukraine in the next month.
Book review time
The Princes of Yen, Richard A Werner 2003 (2nd edition 2016)
What an unexpectedly pleasant surprise! After reading a review that on release this book knocked Harry Potter off the best seller list in Japan for tem weeks I was somewhat dubious about beginning this quite long work however almost immediately became engaged in its fascinating novelty of macroeconomic perspective presented in a very clear explanatory style. The story is compelling as it is astonishing. Although it’s inescapable to avoid comparason with The Big Short, Werner’s work, rather than having its focus the story of a grubby heist pulled off by the usual suspects, has a global relevance to historic (and present) power structures based on a case study of credit creation over the past eighty years in the Japanese economy and the resultant impact on boom/bust outcomes.
Professor Werner is an old Japan hand from Germany, much like Alex Kerr in his absorbtion of the unique Japanese cultural ambience, and during the course of his decades in financial services in Tokyo developed his ‘Quantity Theory of Credit’. It proposes that growth of economic development is determined by the rate of credit creation either on the part of central banks or commercial banks, so long as it not be sterilized by bond issuance and applied to productive enterprise. He states that growth arises from credit creation repaid from the income stream of output, not personal consumption or speculative financial borrowinwing. The spectacular economic growth of post-war Japan, he suggests, has been based on the BoJ’s credit guidance window which has strongly guided commercial bank lending towards preferred industrial enterprise.
Alarmingly, it’s his view that while interest rate policies may have some impact on exchange rates, they are virtually useless with respect to generating GDP growth, ie economic stimulus. A heretic after my own heart. He believes that the BoJ is running the economy on its own agenda and thus directing structural change in Japan and the wider world. Their version of deep state, I assume, but acting on behalf of our own good, no doubt.
This century he has been a UK academic and according to the wikipedia writers incurring the wrath of cancellation on the part of the UK establishment. I couldn’t recommend the book more highly in view of how it completely overturns alternative economic theory.
A widely reprinted 2024 article by Werner on today’s situation vis-a-vis the JPY may be found here
theconversation.com/japan-the-yen-plunges-to-34-year-low-despite-interest-rate-hike-221478
clarification:
… it completely overturns mainstream economic theory …
among more interesting comments on the 2024 article linked above I found the following:
… my visionary contemporary high-profile heroes, apart from Werner, are Ellen Brown, Michael Hudson, and Sergei Glazyev.
Yes, it’s a pitifully short list I know – especially when I have been on this journey for decades.
It used to include an Ausy Steve Keen too, but I comprehensively crossed him off when I realised how hopelessly sucked in he was by the disastrous woke green agendas.
Note that Brown never trained in academia as an economist – she has a legal background. This is what is so intriguing to me – some of the most amazing financial visionaries who have come up with viable money creation and banking solutions, were never formally trained as economists.
So too, C H Douglas, the father of the Social Credit theory (the good one that is) – he was an engineer – trained as a problem solver.
Same too, with Fabio Vighi, a Professor of Critical Theory from Cardiff University – goodness only knows what their funding model is, as Vighi has called out the putrid present system on many different occasions – clearly his narratives are not bought and paid for by the corporates.
And herein lies the entire point for me – in order to keep their jobs, 99% of neo-classical trained economists never intend to even try to solve these problems.
They operate in a comfortably numb state, swamped in a mythical realm of false maxims. They are not the slightest bit interested in solving what you and I see as the monumental and socially destructive problem of the obscene wealth gap and its associated hamster wheel debt traps.
On the contrary, their mode revolves around obfuscating the fundamental causes and perpetuating an inherently broken status quo.
hmmm … books by both Hudson and Glazyev I’ve reviewed here on OFW before, and coincidentally in recent years also dumped Steve Keen when he, in my view, turned commercial.
Anyone with views as to the work of Ellen Brown? The name rings a vague bell but no lasting impression. I will look her up, though.
“In fact, inflation around the world had already been picking up well before the war (which lasted less than three weeks). The Federal Republic of Germany, Europe’s largest economy and biggest energy consumer, experienced its highest inflation rates of the decade throughout 1973 – first peaking at 7.8% in June that year, before the war and any hint of an oil price increase.
So what was already driving inflation around the world at that time? A clue can be found in a 2002 paper written by MIT professor Athanasios Orphanides while he was on the board of the US Federal Reserve (America’s central bank, also known as the Fed). He wrote:
With the exception of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Great Inflation of the 1970s is generally viewed as the most dramatic failure of macroeconomic policy in the United States since the founding of the Federal Reserve … Judging from the dismal outcomes of the decade – especially the rising and volatile rates of inflation and unemployment – it is hard to deny that policy was in some way flawed. . . .
And the responses of central banks and governments to this unprecedented situation did add to the inflationary conditions that were already being created by the unwise (and coordinated) actions of the world’s central banks. “?
What he does ignore is the large increase in the real price of oil?
https://inflationdata.com/articles/inflation-adjusted-prices/historical-crude-oil-prices-table/
https://fortune.com/2023/03/20/is-federal-reserve-too-powerful-inflation-quantitative-easing-richard-werner/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
” growth of economic development is determined by the rate of credit creation either on the part of central banks or commercial banks, so long as it not be sterilized by bond issuance and applied to productive enterprise.”
Of course, the problem is that there must be inexpensive energy and other resources to have “productive enterprise.” As the economy gets less and less productive (because resources, including energy, are constrained), then the interest rate that can be sustained gets progressively lower. At some point, adding more debt is like pushing on a string. It doesn’t get you anywhere.
These authors are not aware of our energy problems, as far as I know. But I would agree that growing debt is terribly important for making the system grow, at least for a while. At some point, the value of the yen to the US$ starts to fall. Or the US$ becomes less and less useful, because other nations choose to trade among themselves, rather than accept US$.
‘Of course, the problem is that there must be inexpensive energy and other resources to have “productive enterprise.”
RAW has a ‘blind spot’?
“Dr. Richard A. Werner
@DrRichardWerner
Jun 21
You err: Using energy is not a problem. The problem is pollution, not economic growth. Economic growth is not the enemy of the environment. That’s obvious, because even if the zero-growth zealots get their way, as in Germany, pollution continues, cutting down forests continues!
Quote
Dr. Steve Keen
@ProfSteveKeen
Jun 21
Replying to @DrRichardWerner
No I don’t Richard! Your virtual world can run without a virtual power plant, but without a real power plant, your virtual world won’t exist. The decoupling of GDP from energy you assume is not happening.”
https://x.com/DrRichardWerner/status/1804210656788517337
I agree. You cannot decouple an economy from energy.
Thanks Gail. Of course you’re correct that unconstrained credit growth applied to productive enterprise does not recognise energy limitations in Werner’s theory (though ironically for speculative purposes it has no impact, it’s the Laser2024 to the wazoo! which can generate inflation if not confined to assets). Glazyev I don’t recall he mentions energy at all nor Hudson in his historical analyses.
I’m still a bit shellshocked by this interest rate changes don’t make any fundamental difference to economic growth. MMT???
my whole frame of view is undergoing revision …
“Examining the relationship between 3-month and 10-year benchmark rates and nominal GDP growth over half a century in four of the five largest economies we find that interest rates follow GDP growth and are consistently positively correlated with growth. If policy-makers really aimed at setting rates consistent with a recovery, they would need to raise them. We conclude that conventional monetary policy as operated by central banks for the past half-century is fundamentally flawed. Policy-makers had better focus on the quantity variables that cause growth.
Reconsidering Monetary Policy: An Empirical Examination of the Relationship Between Interest Rates and Nominal GDP Growth in the U.S., U.K., Germany and Japan”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800916307510
The big things that lower interest rates do are:
(a) Help disguise loss of fossil fuel consumption growth since 1980. The lower rates gives a push to the economy that conceals the loss of growing fossil fuel supply.
(b) The lower interest rates tend to cause a lot if asset price inflation. Asset price inflation is not included in GDP or in inflation measures, but it is a real benefit to the economy. People feel richer. They can borrow more. They can sell shares of stock, or their homes, and profit from the transaction.
Of course, higher interest rates are generally a real drag on the economy, for the same reasons. But by having higher interest rates than other countries, there has been some hope that the US can attract investment to the US. Also, fossil fuel prices are relatively lower in the US than in other countries–the higher interest rate especially push out other countries, including Japan, from buying oil.
I am doubtful that the analysis done really means anything. ” interest rate changes don’t make any fundamental difference to economic growth” isn’t really true. It is just that they are wrapped up in several simultaneous changes that are generally not measured. Leaving energy out of the model gives very poor indications, in my opinion.
Thanks moss . I haven’t read the book but I did see the documentary based on the book a few years back . Enlightens a lot . Here is the link for others who are interested .
Thanks, I didn’t know there was a movie/documentary.
If you enjoy PotY ivan have a look at some of IPOVs other documentaries.
A few worth a view.
The Spiders Web
The Man Who Knew Too Much
97% Owned
Here’s an extended interview with Hudson, from The Spiders Web.
https://youtu.be/15BvHPdpN6M?feature=shared
A short one about XKeyscore, the ability it gives them to rewrite your past and how they can use that to make you guilty of any crime(real or fictitious).
https://youtu.be/9p231YWX1qM?feature=shared
“This paper has suggested a simple model that can account for the key anomalies of the traditional monetary approach. It disaggregates the quantity of credit into a ‘real’ and a financial circulation. In time periods, when the ratio of credit in the financial circulation to credit in the real circulation rises, the simple quantity theory must be expected to disappoint, as it is a special case of the more general quantity theorem of disaggregated credit. In such time periods, a financial boom is likely, as asset prices are driven up by speculative borrowing on the back of collateralised assets. This explains why the traditional monetary quantity theory was not popular in the 1920s and 1930s, and again in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Then the traditionally defined velocity of money declines and excess credit creation can ‘spill over’ as foreign investment. However, during time periods such as the 1950s, when in many countries credit was mainly channeled into the real economy, asset prices remained stable and the traditional quantity theory could be expected to hold. The fact that the model can account for the major anomalies observed in many countries over many time periods demonstrates generality and robustness.
The empirical results for the Japanese case have been unambiguously supportive. The Japanese asset bubble of the 1980s was due to excess credit creation by banks for speculative purposes, largely in the real estate market. The apparent velocity decline is shown to be due to a rise in credit money employed for financial transactions, while the correctly defined velocity of the real circulation is found to be very stable“
https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/36569/1/KK_97_Disaggregated_Credit.pdf
https://blog.fdik.org/2024-03/state-comparism-researchgate_p.pdf
This preprint from German university researchers claims that most of the excess mortality in Germany can be explained by jab uptake rates in the second year of the pandemic. Interesting.
now jab rates are way down and the excess mortality has vanished?
just another delay to the hope for depop.
maybe 2025.
According to the conclusions shown in the Abstract (in a study that look at German excess mortality for the 16 federal states of Germany),
“For the second and third pandemic year a significant positive correlation between the increase of excess mortality and COVID-19 vaccinations is observed, a fact that strongly calls for further investigations on possible negative effects of COVID-19 vaccinations.”
It is really a second and third year effect–especially the third year, as I understand it.
In Section 4.2, (page 15) there is an interesting chart showing the excess mortality rose with higher levels of vaccination in a given federal state. This is disturbing. Later charts show the same effect, and the observation is made, “the highest excess mortality was observed in the most vaccinated regions.”
The conclusion of the report says, in part,
And a new Study shows that more people Covid-vaccinated die than not vaccinated.
The more doses they take, the more they die, considering each cohort.
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2607/12/7/1343
Reported also by this tv news:
https://www.byoblu.com/2024/07/02/nuovo-studio-italiano-i-vaccinati-muoiono-piu-dei-non-vaccinati/
This one is an Italian study.
So it seems that two separate European studies (German and Italian) come to a very similar conclusion.
Interesting! The Italian study clearly was published. As a Preprint, the German probably is published. It is surprising that medical journals are willing to print these reports.
Chris Martenson in this preview video, explains that those who have been vaccinated have a higher risk of early deaths. In fact Portugal has the highest CV19 vacinnation rate in the world and now has the highest death rate in the world.
https://peakprosperity.com/australias-spotlight-program-opens-the-floodgates-on-vaccine-injury/
Here is the followup video from Chris Martenson July 2nd
https://peakprosperity.com/as-the-data-floods-in-the-narrative-crumbles/
Two videos in a row about the fact that it is rapidly becoming common knowledge that the vaccines are neither safe or effective. The second one quotes the recent German study.
Reached the same conclusion by just eyeballing the data at euromomo.eu. data are also consistent with increasing mortality with each jab. noteworthy is also the excess mortality at a time of year when there is normally no excess mortality (the warm season). european data, I agree, also consistent with the main actors cranking up the formula in year 2.
An alternate or complementary partial explanation is that efficacy turns negative around 8 months as I recall. They stopped tracking efficacy at that point.
Renewables from the ground up:
Recently returned to farm with a 120′ tower with thick, beautiful hot dipped galvanizing and a 20kw generator with blades. All in, transportation included, $2K, informed original purchase price >$100K, 15 years in production, so this unit had a depreciation cost of $6K+ per year, or $500+ per month or at $.1/kwh, you do the rest of the math. Add in maintenance 120′ in the air and it adds up. Mine came disassembled, U-Haul + trailer to farm.
My first project will be remanufacturing where necessary the head, no reason to raise a pile of junk. I am very good at making things and have a very complete machine shop. This is not a common hobby, nor skill set.
MREA is showing declining attendance at their fair; it is for old hippies. Met an 80-year-old frat brother, retired nuclear engineer; doesn’t get any better.
Gail says transmission of electricity is going to be a problem going forward, walking the grounds of MREA stumbled across the turbine, one thing lead to another and I am green. I believe you guys, I try to pick and choose and find something which might work locally.
So, when done, where do I get my cubic mile of Pt?
Dennis L.
Sounds like you got a used wind turbine that you may be able to get to work. Even if you don’t, you have an interesting project to work on. The turbine, if it works, can be used to pump water, if nothing else.
I am pretty sure people didn’t think about monthly depreciation that needed. The output of the wind turbine basically replaces natural gas or coal needed to be burned to produce the electricity. Its cost is something like $.02 or $.03 per kWh, so $.10 per kWh in depreciation, alone, is not a good deal.
The people doing the analysis were looking at EROEI. These analyses came up with misleadingly high indications. Perhaps, if electricity generated by oil was being replaced (including all of the distribution to consumers), and wind turbines lasted a lot longer than they really do, it would make sense.
“So, when done, where do I get my cubic mile of Pt?”
maybe you will stumble upon it the next time you are walking the grounds of the MREA fair.
dennis
you have a comprehensive machine shop—-good,
but that needs 3 things
consistency of power input, consistency of material throughput, and consistency of product output.
remove any one, and the other two become immediately redundant.
“consistency of power input”
Perhaps for cnc, can do that, need my electronics courses so I can purchase older machines and be confident of maintenance.
Material throughput requires material, amazing what comes up at auctions when shops close. If traceability of material is not an issue, not a problem.
Consistency of output, nah, this is for repairs only. A Bridgeport while now a very dated machine can build some amazing projects. Add a grinder and you are good to tenths. Mill came out of the GM plant in CA, mold shop, damn nice machine.
What kills you is the overhead, mainly rent for shop and then heat/air.
I dehumidify only, seems to work well enough. When work heat/cool.
Dennis L.
dennis
power input means outside power supply to your workshop—
output means selling what you produce.
i thought that would be blindingly obvious
i think you envisage running your enterprise on stuff mined from saturns moons
or something.
unless you’re running a lathe operated by pedalling a bike
or something
Let me help you a bit in business.
In my position one only makes things which are capital to that business, that means they have a depreciable lifespan.
Selling something is a one and done, next customer; it is the time between customers which is overhead. You need margin, see one of the last paragraphs.
The point on the turbine is assuming the original price was correct, $100K, not factoring in the cost of decommissioning which required a crane, not considering the cost of patiently sorting parts to same which was done prior to my purchase, my purchasing it for about $2K with trucking in very good condition. It does not make much money.
The turbine is an option, currently a relatively cheap option should the grid fail which Gail thinks possible.
While I have some solar, never installed but complete, have considered a larger installation, directly imported from China. But, there are toxic waste issues; reported to me at MREA that is in neighborhood of $25/panel. This means the salvage value is a negative number and that affects the NPV.
Norm, I was in the dental lab business for a number of years, was the third largest account J&J had for lab supplies(porcelains mostly) in the US. I know a bit about business. GM was having problems at that time, had they been able to sell a Cadillac per unit weight at the same rate as my lab a Caddy would have been $20m/unit.
Farming is a really tough, low margin business with incredible capital costs.
Thanks for the note, hope this helps you understand better.
Now, where is my cubic mile of Pt?
Dennis L.
odd mixup between weight and value/price there dennis
you say you know something about ”business”
yet you compare car costs with dental production costs–i find that very odd.
please correct if i’m wrong here, but teeth are like fingerprints–every one in the world is unique—therefore all dental lab work has to be custom made.–that is why it costs so much.
cars are identical, apart from a few cosmetic details,hence GM can bang out a million of them at a relatively low price
then you leap about from solar to farming, with no cohesive link.
Seems like Dennis is just pointing out that a product can be priced according to its end value to the user. He found a business where that premium was high rather than low.
Now, Dennis.. my dentist is telling me I need a crown (large old filling now with parts of the pre-molar broken off). Porcelain or gold?
“Porcelain or gold?”
Plutonium.
If China doesn’t like the data, it seems not to report it.
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/China-Stops-Reporting-Renewable-Energy-Utilization-Data.html
A different symptom of Permian Basin problems:
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/us-mexican-truckers-unite-to-protest-low-wages-poor-working-conditions?oly_enc_id=7576E4150945E5B
US, Mexican truckers unite to protest low wages, poor working conditions
Convoy of oilfield truckers plan to travel through West Texas Monday to highlight grievances
Meanwhile back at the farm .
https://www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/1119533/massive-discounts-summer-sales-kick-off-amid-record-low-sales-tbtb
https://www.wsaz.com/2024/07/01/struggling-with-falling-demand-farm-equipment-deere-co-announces-nearly-600-layoffs/
https://www.themirror.com/lifestyle/shopping/walgreens-store-closures-cost-living-567199
The John Deere situation is particularly worrying, since they make farm equipment.
That is a huge reduction in income. If farmers aren’t making enough income, they will quit. Some of them are old enough to retire.
Farmers in the US Midwest are having a problem with too much rain. They may have problems with low yield, also.
—-
Regarding the Walgreens article, my impression is that all of the drug stores were pumped up a great deal in 2020 -2021 with all of the covid-related tests and immunizations. Now that they don’t have that source of revenue, they are all doing less well. Other chains made layoffs earlier. Walgreens seems to be late to the layoff party.
And John Deere isn’t the only one. All the major farming equipment manufacturers are in trouble.
The AGCO group has also announced layoffs.
Among the group’s brands we find tractors like Massey Ferguson, Fendt, Challenger and the combine harvester manufacturer Laverda.
https://www.manufacturingdive.com/news/agco-reveals-layoffs-citing-weakening-demand/720198/
The CNH group (with Case IH, New Holland, Steyr, etc.) also joins the companies complaining of a decrease in demand.
https://www.agriculturedive.com/news/cnh-industrial-begins-job-cuts-as-weak-market-factors-loom-Q3/700179/
From the ground, literally:
Rain is hell, it doesn’t stop for more than one or two days and I am not in the worst of it. Some guys could run a small outboard in their fields.
Crop insurance pays money, that is not grain in the bin nor ultimately food in the stomach.
Food: Had necessity to grab a cold sandwich on the road, horrible food, this stuff is literally killing people, fat everywhere.
Dennis L.
Nothing to be a concern about, it’s probably a once in a 500 or 1000 year event…
Yes, processed food is indeed killing us, but it’s highly profitable, and if you become sick with a chronic illness from it that’s another plus, the health care, pharmacy industry will expand too.
Our health care industry is enormously large already. The situation has to change.
JD makes beautiful equipment, their service is excellent but incredibly expensive.
This equipment is too complicated, too big and that in my opinion is secondary to no labor in the country.
Autonomous is coming very soon now. JD has a sprayer which recognizes say soybeans and does not spray, everything else is individually sprayed, clever idea. Sprayer drives itself, carbon fiber booms.
China appears to make relatively reasonably priced machines, probably sacrifices cab comfort. Put your butt in the saddle for a few hours and a deluxe seat seams a very reasonable option.
It is not uncommon for some farmers to drive their equipment 30 miles to the next field, much equipment moves at > 25mph. This is big stuff, much of it tracked – think track wear and expense. Big machines mean need for large land which is not always contiguous. That may be why in IA come land goes for >$20k per acre, next door to existing farm.
Sunday saw Amish, well dressed, in buggies, returning from worship/fellowship, day off as in Bible. Seems like a reasonable life.
On workday day one wag, moving hay with four hay burners, he is the nigh horsepower guy on the block, uses 8 for plowing.
Dennis L.
This complex machinery seems to have many ways to fail. Trying to keep all of the replacement parts in stock plus enough trained workers to do the fixing has to be close to impossible. Hence, the cost of repairs has to be outrageously high.
At some point, complexity becomes too high to pay off. Maybe some farms have enough contiguous land to use this machinery, but a lot of farms do not.
Bushes and trees help to cut wind, and (I would think) help keep soil from blowing away. It might be a good idea to keep some of them.
Agree with last paragraph:
We are mining our soil, it is real and will result in increasing pain. The mining of soil makes farming look more profitable than it is, if one looks at the salvage value of the soil at the end of depletion, the “income” is less than calculated on a yearly cashflow basis.
CRP is a good solution to this, but where does that money come from?
No easy solutions.
Dennis L.
Yes but isn’t this really because they are moving the jobs to Mexico??
The “Amish” around here just drive their buggies on Sunday visits to their neighbors. The rest of the time they are on tractors like everyone else….but their entry into our area has just driven farm ground prices insane. They sold out in southern Ontario for $30,000.00/acre so the “sky is the limit” when they arrive here.
Of course they will now encounter real winter and their enthusiasm will wane, their god will not bless their hubris and they will slowly go bankrupt like everyone else who tried this same tired out timeworn “real estate” transaction.
Cattle prices are soaring as the North American herd implodes in size……my hairy highland crosses and bison just keep stuffing their faces with very wet grass and tend to ignore humans if at all possible.
John Deere is the machines I use primarily but they are all vintage 1975 machines…..EMP proof. The modern machines have been priced 3-4 times above comparable imports so it is hard to feel sorry for that multi national corporation. That and their local dealers are all con men.
May they implode like all the rest of the nature gobbling big corporations……in the end, all that will remain is vast silence and the grunting from herds plowing hairy heads through fallen snow.
Humanity is now in the process of going away.
“The modern machines have been priced 3-4 times above comparable imports”
I can understand that this would be a big issue.
“Humanity is now in the process of going away.”
true!
there are many potential bottlenecks upcoming in the next million years or so, and one of them will surely cause human extinction.
I would like to be an outside observer to see this unfold, but Reality is coming for me probably within the next decade or so.
the problem around here is that inhumanity is thriving
Cro,
“their god will not bless their hubris and they will slowly go bankrupt like everyone else who tried this same tired out timeworn “real estate” transaction.”
Don’t know, not really inside, did care for their dental needs while at a FQHC. They are very closed, but got one to chat a bit. They are communal which means no/less overhead in transactions between members, think FICA taxes, etc. They don’t seem to charge each other interest.
In my area no tractors, have seen a group waiting for a ride with gasoline cans, this was at a service station.
As for god, don’t think of Him as that personal. View it as someone experimenting with universe and satisfied with an 80/20 ratio. Quite an accomplishment really, we are the apex.
Local dealers make good money, service in my area is expensive but first rate; you get what you pay for.
Locally, haven’t had any EMP’s lately, probably different in Canada, eh?
Dennis L.
Farming will concentrate in large holdings, think Gates, machinery will be autonomous, labor content will continue to decline.
Temptation to mine the soil will continue, that is not good at all.
Dennis L.
They also have the new headwind of “loot $950 consequence-free” in a number of urban areas. Lesser amounts are effectively ignored elsewhere also. Too much trouble to capture and process the perps?
Thanks Gail for the reposting of that article on the effects of the Chinese property market implosion leading to a world wide real estate problem as the Chinese sell off the foreign real estate assets.
If the Chinese Government can coordinate the sell off to really pick up in late summer or early fall of this year It can give the US hegemon a massive economic crisis before the US can start its war with China. Real estate value collapse, banking crisis, stock market implosion, local government funding crisis.
And the most likely response from the US will be even more massive money printing, leading to Tim Morgan’s expected currency crisis: where the Dollar loses most of its value.
The end of this evil empire, that grew out of the US military industrial political complex after the end of the Cold War and has been waging an endless War of Terror, is now in sight.
… followed by another one just as evil. Urrrr.
perhaps “just as” but any next empire will have far less available surplus energy and therefore will probably be unable to do as much damage as the US Evil Empire.
Far less available surplus energy means more damage will be done to the US populace.
I’m not worried.
I disagree, but it is only because oil will deplete first. I think transportation will decline first.
“The end of this evil empire, that grew out of the US military industrial political complex after the end of the Cold War and has been waging an endless War of Terror, is now in sight.”
yes the remaining days of the US Evil Empire are numbered.
though probably numbered in the many thousands of days.
the USA, with domestic production and 4 mbpd of Canadian imports, still has about 20 mbpd available.
that massive surplus energy can enable the USA to do a lot more damage for many years to come.
our industrial capabilities are so degraded by financialization, offshoring, and circus distractions of all kinds that our capacity to do damage below the nuclear threshold is limited – very good news! everyone internationally smells blood.
Correct . The US industrial capacity is only 10.7 % of GDP .
How you gonna make anything of value the rest of the world wants much less provide your own people with affordable goods will an 11% industrial output?
And how much of that 11% does the Military Industrial Maggots suck up with useless overpriced ‘weapons’ that look like diddly squat compared to battle tested Russian ones?
Probably at least 5-6% of that pitiful 11% . Best of luck in the never ending wars .
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/manufacturing-value-added-to-gdp
Interesting! I see that Ireland is at 38%. I expect the domicile of the company, even if it has nothing to do with where production takes place, plays an important role. Tax havens do well.
I see that Algeria is at 34.8%. I am not sure why. Suriname (in South America) is at 29%. Haiti is at 23.1%. Zimbabwe is at 21.5%. Poor countries who do nothing else do a lot of manufacturing, as a share of GDP.
I see that China is at 27.7%. The ratios are also high for countries in Southeast Asia. Thailand is at 27%. Myanmar is at 25.6%. South Korea is also at 25.6%. Viet Nam is at 24.8%. Malaysia is at 23.4%. Bangladesh is at 21.8%. Japan is at 19.2%. India is only at 13.3%.
Within the European area, the countries that are high in 2022 (besides Ireland) are Belarus 24%; Turkey 22.1%; Czechia 21%; Slovakia 20.3%; Germany 18.4%; Switzerland 18.4%; Poland 17.4%.
Russia was only at 12.8% in 2022, but that is probably higher now because of the making of war materials. I expect the US’s manufacturing is now higher, also because of making of war materials.
So it seems that Macron is out, replaced by a new political “hope” to put the population in an eternal cycle of false expectations.
Credit must be given to him, however, because he was the only one who had the courage to say that “the era of abundance” is over for good.
As someone living in Europe, recently I started wondering about what European elites are thinking of doing, what they will be able to come up with now that the Western socio-economic system has reached the end of the line.
When all their theories and economic models will no longer make sense in the European society of 2030/2035.
A society with no more cheap energy to use, an old and rusty infrastructure and an aging population.
Anyway, there’s nothing we can do about it. We are at the mercy of events.
In general, worrying is useless and has never served any purpose, I am fully aware of this.
Every change occurs only when it is inevitable, condemning those who remain to always remedy the disasters that began many decades before them.
Humanity lives in almost perfect cycles it would seem, always repeating and remedying the same mistakes.
I am afraid you are correct. Europe has problems that cannot be remedied. There seem to be perfect cycles.
Right now, there seems to be swing to the right politically. A few years ago, the short-term swing was toward the left politically. Macron seems to be out as part of that swing. I would not be surprised if Biden (or substitute) loses because of that swing in the US.
The swing to the right will reach its apex with “Spanish Inquisition” level violence. Just watch and see as the human herd turns against the woke, the privileged, and the monied.
I fully expect if he and his cabinet do not flee the country we will see Trudeau and Freeland and all the rest of the political ruling class hung by their necks in front of Canadian Parliament as our economy continues to implode and the conservatives reveal they are unable to steer the ship of state away from rock strewn shoals in gale force winds.
We are rapidly heading for a complete collapse of the nation state and as lineage based “competition’ emerges humankind will completely destroy itself now.
“the political ruling class hung by their necks”
While a satisfying image, I don’t see it happening in the West. Decades of self-domestication. Who would be doing the deed?
It’s a strange situation. All the politicians and media are panicking, God knows why.
What we call the far right in France seems to have adopted the most mainstream views on what’s really important. Despite this, Macron and his camp are now allied with the far left, something I never expected.
There must be some underground reason!
Ed summed it well,
“God is dead, Nietzsche.”
“Nietzsche is dead, God.”
Religion lost its way, wanted to solve earthly problems. Man needs a set of rules which work for the group most of the time. Perfection is the enemy of good enough.”
It took 27b years to get a place for humans to thrive, it will go on and when necessary, a thumb will be placed on the scale to make it so.
Dennis L.
Some food for thought . Copy/ paste from Quark in Spain . Thinking of David Korowicz .
” It is the systems that are depleted and die, not the resources. Resources cease to have meaning when the system that considers them resources ceases to exist.
Oil is a resource because there is a system out there for which it is useful. In the year 1000 AD, there was much more oil than now, but it did not exist as a resource.
Oil will be depleted as a resource because the system that considers it a resource will cease to exist. We may be able to have another system of similar complexity that uses another energy resource (sun, wind, water) or the system may no longer require it because it has ceased to exist as a system. I am inclined to the second option.
The forest on Easter Island was a resource. Before the forest disappeared, the Moai civilization disappeared. The forest died later, probably due to the change in ecological conditions caused by the Moai civilization itself.
It is a matter of systems, not of rocks and bushes
The global population is about to crash like Reindeer Island. After that, they’ll be plenty of resources left…
Ok ok, but the TIMING?
Too soon…
the 2050s.
oil only acquires value at the point where it is burned, or otherwise used
I agree with you. It is the systems that cannot be supported that are the problem. Our leaders and researchers keep thinking of more elaborate systems, but we cannot support the system we have now. There are diminishing returns to added complexity.
Electricity was last to scale up as a way of using fossil fuels. It will likely be first to collapse.
Oh my, but what about charging my EV, Digital currency,
my Air conditioner with record heat waves, and the thousands other devices that make BAU possible.
Not to worry, they will think of something…
I want to bring the recommendation of this document up to a higher level, so more people will see it. It was recommended by JavaKinetic in an earlier comment.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2024/06/22/the-advanced-economies-are-headed-for-a-downfall/comment-page-3/#comment-462605
You have to sign up with your email to get the 50 page document.
https://macro-alchemist.mykajabi.com/
The document is called, “Who gets the house?” by Michael Peregrine of Santiago Capital who calls himself “Macro Alchemist.” He talks about the divorce that the US and China are going through, and says that there is an interconnection among housing markets that will tend to pull other markets with the Chinese problems.
The report has a lot of interesting (and many familiar) charts. He points out, “employment is one of the last of the lagging indicators to drop.” We are probably already heading into recession–it just isn’t showing up in the data.
We would say that energy supplies and many other things are involved in the recession that is approaching, but this report has some interesting insights as well.
One thing the article says, is
This is a major concern.
I’m not going to sign in for that, so does he discuss what percentage of housing and real estate assets the Chinese own? If that’s not shown, then there is insufficient data to predict any outcomes.
It’s an interesting article, which complements the topics often talked about here. He discusses the percentages in several major cities. I’m from Vancouver. From what I see, its probably about right.
Well Vancouver is ground zero for Chinese real estate. Not much in Michigan for example. Plus it is sort of known that Vancouver real estate is a huge bubble.
I tried repeatedly to view it, but it just sent me back to the page, “In the Great Economic Divorce, who gets the house?”.
I did get that document — they’d sent me a confirmation email to respond to.
“We would say that energy supplies and many other things are involved in the recession that is approaching, but this report has some interesting insights as well.”
I scrolled through the 48 pages, & noticed nothing about the results of depleting resources.
The report is limited in that respect.
Didn’t read, but my observations concur with your quoted paragraph, Gail. I follow an economic data feed
forexfactory.com/calendar
which lists data coming in throughout the day and have been thinking to myself these last few days with the monthly Manufacturing Indices and PMI all coming in just how ugly it was all looking.
We could well be into a global recession already.
With respect to the second point about Chinese property investors cashing out and “crashing” the market, a blog artist I’ve cited here previously, IPOdeepthroat, has a very convincing argument (to me) that the Chinese have set up our financial and real asset markets, through Caymans Is and US subsidiaries of Chinese banks to lend into asset markets for the purpose of a future intention to simmultaneously sell out and crash them.
deepthroatipo.com
me? No opinion – no one knows the future
It’s not just that … when prices plunge so will the wealth effect. People will be really scared. Then retirement will disappear next…
Chinamerica has been around a long while and even a book title with it.
Seems both economic systems are so intertwined they really may be fused as one .
Breaking them apart, as we are seeing now, is like separating joined twins.
Very complicated procedure and in most cases no guarantee of success.
Very painful and traumatic and long recovery time, no promise of functioning afterwards.
We boomers should consider ourselves lucky to have lived through this period in the West…free ride
We are certainly very dependent on China now. Without China, we can’t make much of anything.
Long while ago, WSJ had an article of a manufacturer that wanted to stay in the USA and modernize. His accountant advised him not to because even if did so, China would be able to undercut him significantly.
So, he was forced to move operations over to China
Who gets the house?
It would seem that neither the US nor China is getting the kids, although the US is adopting a few.
Good point. Someone has to be able to afford the houses that are available.
Falling birth rates are a real problem, but more immigrants somewhat help the problem.
The Chinese bought western properties because they had too many dollars and needed to convert them into real assets. If they send these properties, for what? More Dollars ? What did I miss?
That is an interesting point. If China sells these properties and just gets dollars back, is that really very helpful?
My question ? Why should they sell their properties and that too en masse ? All these Chinese purchased them as insurance in case they have to flee China for whatsoever reason . The only reason I can see is if the West does a Russia on China and starts targeting private Chinese citizens assets in the West a la the oligarchs of Russia . Extremely low case scenario . A storm in a teacup .
I have a partial answer to your question.
I know that in my neighborhood, there are quite a few unoccupied buildings. Some of them have Chinese (American citizen?) owners. They have been bought as speculative investments, hoping that prices would rise some more. Or that the owners could “make a killing” in the Airbnb market. One building with Chinese owners seems to have been built as a dorm for the nearby university, but the area is zoned for single family housing.
At some point, buildings sitting empty become a problem. Even office buildings with very low occupancy become a problem. I don’t know where the loans are from, but if there are loans from China, I believe the point that was being made was that failing loans, outside the China, would likely be cut off before those within China. “Extend and pretend” would continue to be used longer inside the borders of China than outside. This is why there could be a massive sale on buildings in other countries.
I have been following this guy for a long time and he rarely touches on energy that’s why I’m more inclined to listen to eurodollar university…
I don’t understand how this sort of thing could even be constructed without the fossil-fuel-based infrastructure?
https://www.google.com/search?q=natrium+reactor&oq=natrium+r&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqCQgAEEUYOxiABDIJCAAQRRg7GIAEMgkIARBFGDsYgAQyBwgCEAAYgAQyBggDEEUYOTIHCAQQABiABDIJCAUQABgKGIAEMgcIBhAAGIAEMgcIBxAAGIAEMgkICBAAGAoYgAQyBwgJEAAYgASoAgiwAgE&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
You are right. It needs fossil fueled infrastructure. Also, a lot of front-end debt to support all of this building.
Another oil price article supporting Gail on solar.
Last month, Al Ghais said that peak oil demand is not on the horizon, blasting the International Energy Agency’s prediction that global oil demand would peak before 2030.
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/OPEC-The-World-Cannot-Run-on-Renewable-Energy-and-EVs.html
Interesting that he doesn’t seem too worried about peak oil supply either.
Maybe it’s just not a short term problem?
‘Peak demand’ is the closest mainstream opinion can come to saying ‘depletion’. For now. It’s either that or unlimited oil forever, and also climate change isn’t a problem. A lot of discourse nowadays especially about big picture issues involves making up a distorted fantasy version of the real problem and then arguing over it.
I think you are right.
Not sure how much impact this has. My understanding is that now that Canada can pipe its Alberta sands crude via the just completed Trans Mountain Pipeline to either US west coast refineries (are there any? I thought they were all in the TX /LA Gulf Coast) or off to China -to play one country against the other.
So how does extra supply cause prices to increase? Is it because the TMX pipeline command higher prices from the drillers because they know the drillers can now make up the price cut through increased volume of sales? On the other hand, if I were a driller, I would counter with the fact that the pipeline has huge cost overruns (even if owned by the Canadian Govt) and needs to start piping oil, even at low prices to get some revenue.
“Over the past decade, there have been periods of time when WCS traded at discounts of about $40 per barrel below WTI due to a lack of enough pipeline capacity to take rising Canadian crude oil production out of Alberta. Such was the case in 2018 and 2019, when high production but insufficient takeaway capacity were depressing Canadian heavy crude prices, limiting profits for producers even as they boosted their output amid higher global oil prices and strong oil demand.
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Trans-Mountain-Oil-Pipeline-Off-to-a-Solid-Start.html
TMX pipeline has a capacity of maybe 500,000 barrels per day.
if Canada didn’t raise it 6 mbpd production, then the US would have more competition for the 4 mbpd or so of oil that it imports from Canada.
but most sources seem to say that Canada in fact is trying to up their production by 500,000 or so per day to keep exporting the 4 mbpd to the US and to gain additional sales from their west coast.
from the little I see, it still looks good that Canada indeed will soon raise production to about 6.5 mbpd.
Canada has a refining capacity of about 2 mbpd so they must export any production above that amount.
Canada exporting 4 mbpd, US importing the 4 mbpd is a win/win for the 2 countries.
more sales via TMX looks like another win for Canada.
US + Canada production of about 20 mbpd is amazing beautiful fantastic glorious wonderful.
Qatar funds Lebanon army
“Lebanon army receives additional $20 million from Qatar in support to troops”
https://english.alarabiya.net/News/middle-east/2024/07/01/lebanon-army-receives-additional-20-million-from-qatar-in-support-to-troops
This is surely done under US approval, as Qatar is one of its first alley in the region.
The purpose is probably to discourage Israeli murderous fury of this moment.
The area is boiling…
Student , you are reading the tea leaves incorrectly . Yes , it is with permission from USA . What you got wrong is that the money is for the Lebanese army and NOT Hezbollah . Hezbollah is not the Lebanese army , Hezbollah is a militia ( like IRA , Vietcong , Hamas etc) . It is a mass based people movement / militia . The Lebanese army is actually used to suppress Hezbollah and has never fought the Israeli’s . It is Hezbollah that does the fighting . Anyway this $ 20 million will be skimmed away and nothing will come out it . 50% of the Lebanese army itself is full of Hezbollah sympathizers and they pass on all inside info to Nasrallah . An interesting development which now opens the door for the Arab countries to finance Hezbollah . So beat the drums of war .
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/arab-league-suddenly-revokes-hezbollahs-terrorist-designation
Raviuppal4, the things you say are well known by everone and I know very well.
They are points so clear that I couldn’t think that one could think that another person doesn’t know that.
I thought that my message was clear, anyway I try to explain better for you.
The point is that Arab Countries in the sorrounding (see Qatar, Jordan, Saudi Arabia) are very worried that Israel will enter Lebanon to fight Hezbollah, because that will create other refugees, additional desperation and poor economic conditions in the area.
The purpose is to help the Lebanese army to try to contain the fury that Israel has in this moment.
If no army is present in Lebanon, Israel will burn to the ground everything and will complete destroy Lebanon, Hezbollah or whatever is there.
Gas shortage in Egypt.
“One of Egypt’s largest petrochemicals companies plans within a consortium to import US shale gas to address a shortage in natural gas supplies that forced several chemicals factories to temporarily shut down twice in June”
https://english.alarabiya.net/business/energy/2024/07/01/egypt-s-consortium-to-import-us-shale-gas-addressing-natural-gas-shortage
Good luck on actually getting sufficient natural gas from the US. I don’t think that natural gas prices can rise high enough, and stay there, to encourage the exports everyone hopes for.
Natural gas is basically a waste product of oil extraction. Catching natural gas, cleaning it up, and piping it (or making it into LNG and transporting the LNG) is terribly expensive. My guess is that the net energy very quickly becomes negative, with all of the required infrastructure, and the amount of natural gas that needs to be burned to make the whole process work.
Yes, I agree and it is additional funny, then, that they have to import gas from US, a very far place, when it is full of gas supplier Countries in the sorrounding…
My impression is that it is an alternative way to give financial support to Egypt, which remains a Country on the brink of imploding, but it needs not to do it, at least at the moment, with a war on its border.
Good point!
I seem unable to find a convincing explanation that non biological dissipative structures (hurricanes and stars) indeed follow the MPP. First of all which kind of power? A hurricane has both thermal and mechanical power. The original roddier book, which I have, skims over it. Suggestions?
The oily blog deleted a map of Texas pipeline. It’s staggering and begs ???s.
What was the cost?
How much does that take away from ROI?
Even though the fracking has a short life investors thought it worthwhile.
Is that because the resources to build the infrastructure is readily available now as opposed to the future?
Even if it’s a loss maybe the short time benefit of reducing oil prices was worth it.
In any case there’s probably a lot of other areas to do this again in the future?
Notes:
Texas has over 47,000 miles of natural gas transmission pipelines.
Texas has 176 natural gas processing facilities.
Texas has 40 natural gas storage facilitates with 847 BCF of total underground natural gas storage capacity.
I tried to figure out which pipeline this might be. I found this link about a controversial proposed natural gas pipeline. The article doesn’t say that the pipeline would facilitate exports, but I am pretty sure that would be the point of the new pipeline.
https://news.oilandgaswatch.org/post/companys-plans-for-690-mile-natural-gas-pipeline-would-affect-thousands-of-landowners-in-texas-louisiana
Company’s plans for 690-mile natural gas pipeline would affect thousands of landowners in Texas, Louisiana
Also:
“Once you have one pipeline, you’ve got a corridor,” Reznik said. “And the chances of paralleling that pipeline are great.”
I don’t think we have enough natural gas to build big pipelines carrying natural gas for export away. The prices that customers are willing to pay is not high enough to support all of the cost of this massive new pipeline (plus the LNG export terminals). Farmers are afraid of explosions and other potential problems. I bet it won’t really happen.
Here is what i think is a good analogy for the goal of becoming a renewable powered civilization.
Industial civilization is currently a lot like an animal, we are powered by consuming stored energy in the food we eat.
A renewable system is a lot more like a plant, it taps into the intermittent flow of solar energy.
We are trying to turn an animal into a plant.
A comparison of the structure and behavior of plants and animals shows they are fundamentally different, thus highlighting that the problem is basic to how each system operates.
I think your wrong in your argumentation.
solar panel and wind turbine don’t have have the abilitation of self replicating system like nature do, they need a Flow of raw material that is not renewable because of depletion (http://roperld.com/science/minerals /minerals.htm).
They need also human to make them and try to make and economie with this kind of energy.
Furthermore they need fossil fuel to make them to make Steel and the plastic and carbon to make the wind blade for the process.
Like any dissipative structure there are not elves or sequoia they suffer from the effect of time due do corrosion, friction and any kind of wear.
when you try to take energy from a dissipative structure like any system they suffer from the thermodynamique effect of wear and they must be replaced .
I was pointing out the difficulty ( impossibility??) in metamorphizing from an animal into a plant.
But i do agree with you that PV panels and big wind turbines are not likely to be renewable. But if i said, coppiced wood lots, passive solar design, and wooden wind mills providing intermittent mechanical power many people would not recognize it as the real renewable option.
(some of the wind power might be stored as compressed air for specialized applications. and some form of water power should also be possible. )
You make good points. Self replication is very important.
“Half of EV Owners Experience Buyers’ Remose”
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/climate/half-of-ev-owners-experience-buyers-remose/
From the article:
I understand that stand-alone companies that produce charging stations and sell the output (in Europe, at least) have had a hard time being profitable. Their prices tend to be very high.
ChargePoint is the biggest US company of this type. It seems to be operating at a loss.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240605232269/en/ChargePoint-Reports-First-Quarter-Fiscal-Year-2025-Financial-Results
Since many of the areas where electric cars are used are very progressive and wealthy, I’m not sure why there was no cooperation to build renewable energy capturing infrastructure to charge the cars in any of them. This would show that evs are viable, at least, in large metropolitan areas and everyone could see how a “green economy” would work for transportation.
If I were trying to demonstrate the viability of a new energy resource I’d be building small scale demonstrations instead of just showing components of a renewable energy economy like an machine that runs on batteries but is charged by fossil fuels or a wind farm that’s not being depended on to power anything 100%.
To me, the reason why there was “no cooperation to build renewable energy capturing infrastructure to charge the car,” is pretty obvious: There is no way that it can be done. Every part of the system, including wind and solar, depends on fossil fuels. The story we are being told is basically nonsense.
Many governments have issued mandates or quotas for renewable energy generation as part of the energy mix for energy providers.
It’d be easy to dismiss it all as nonsense and get on with one’s day if there were no mandates and quotas.
If it’s nonsense, it is being taken very seriously.
Latest from Mr B , The Honest Sorcerer .
https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/2019-peak-western-civilization-e5bbe04a70ed
Mr B… hmmm. This wouldn’t be Ugo Bardi by any chance? Remember his YouTube chats with Gail and others from 2015-16. Good times, back when collapse was fun to speculate about, as opposed to palpably unfolding before us.
No , it is not Ugo Bardi .
Definitely not Ugo Bardi. Ugo doesn’t make nice charts like this. He has overly optimistic ideas of what renewables will do.
I would highly recommend this article. B makes a lot of point that are very important. B uses OECD/non-OECD splits like I do. And he focuses on similar categories.
It’s high time the supermarkets started selling canned heat again, as they used to in the 1960s. One rock band even took its name from the product.
The ‘old’ paradigm?
“When the private sector commercial banks engage in extending credit to the economy, this is equivalent to ‘printing new paper money’: Increased bank lending injects new, additional purchasing power into the economy, which stimulates demand and produces economic growth. This increased purchasing power is used for an economic transaction, and then returns to the banks in the form of a deposit. This mechanism is called ‘credit creation’, and through this means purchasing power is expanded in an economy.
Things began to go wrong with this process of steady creation of new purchasing power from 1982 onwards. Since that time, private banks have engaged in fierce competition for market share, in order to preserve their ranking in the pecking order of banks. They began to sell too much of their product, which is the supply of credit, and at fire-sale prices. This resulted in an increase of the broad money supply. The
funds that were created by banks extending credit with land as collateral were channelled into real estate or stocks. What has since become clear is that the prices of the assets used as collateral were pushed up by bank credit creation, which injected new purchasing power into asset markets, raising asset prices further.
The quantity of bank credit creation seemed to grow virtually without limit.
In this way, credit creation vastly exceeded the amount necessary for the “real” economy. According to mainstream economic theory, in this case there should be inflation. However, in actual fact, although money creation continued to outstrip nominal GDP growth, inflation remained low. This has been a major puzzle for economists who have been building their work on the assumption that monetary growth increases proportionally to nominal GDP growth – as shown in Fisher’s or the so-called ‘quantity equation’, whereby the quantity of money M times its velocity of circulation is equal to nominal GDP.
The solution to this puzzle is simple: It is also possible that money (the total amount of purchasing power) may be channelled towards financial transactions for lengthy time periods. In that case nominal GDP is not directly affected.”?
https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/340476/1/Translation_Werner_QE_Nikkei_Sep_1995_final1.pdf
Demographics brings the crunch in the next few years, as an avalanche of boomers poses increasing demands on health and aged care in particular. These liabilities are unfunded.
Yields on savings are insufficient so savings – mostly bonds – themselves will have to be liquidated, driving bond prices down.
The reason that money-printing has not caused massive inflation, thus far, is that these dollars have been ‘parked’ in financial assets.
It is however the fate of every dollar in existence that it will one day be used to bid for goods and services in the real physical world. At current prices for goods and services that real physical world is unable to deliver the goods and services that dollar-holders expect, therefore the prices of goods and services must rise.
World’s largest solar plant featuring over 5 million panels gets switched on in China: ‘It looks really cool’
The panels extend as far as the eye can see.
https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/worlds-largest-solar-plant-china-activated/
Now, a subsidiary of the China Green Development Investment Group has turned on the “world’s largest” solar plant, a 3.5-gigawatt operation in the Xinjiang region, as PV Magazine reported. Referred to as the Xinjiang Midong solar project, it has more than 5.26 million panels, according to the news outlet. For reference, a gigawatt can power 100 million LED light bulbs.
Reuters reported that the 32,947-acre solar farm in Xinjiang, which came online June 3, will generate about 6.09 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year — enough to power the country of Papua New Guinea for a year, per the news service.
The developer is a state-owned outfit with wind and/or solar projects in 12 provinces, according to the organization’s website.
We adhere to the philosophy of ‘people-oriented, ecology as the root, and culture as the soul,'” the website states.
The new operation was built in stages with a 15.45 billion Chinese yuan (about $2.13 billion) investment, according to PV Magazine. It features monocrystalline bifacial double-glass PV panels and 129 miles of transmission lines.
Rotten to the soul, that is….a testament to our folly
We must hope and pray to St. Greta that it doesn’t encounter any major hailstorms like the one that struck a sola project in Texas recently.
And this in India .
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/indore/storm-damages-worlds-biggest-floating-solar-plant/articleshow/109231119.cms
Accompanied, I believe, by the release of toxic substances.
Anyone know how the operators of these panels deal with desert sand?
If you ever propose anything solar in Arabia, all they want to know is how you deal with sand. Essentially same as a car windshield, wipers and water jet.
It would be interesting to see what happens to the wholesale electricity rates in Texas. Europe has been having a problem with rates turning negative for times when there is too much wind and solar present. California has this problem, too. I would expect Texas to have this problem as well. We should expect that it would become difficult for every kind of electricity producer to make an adequate profit because wholesale rates are too low, too much of the time.
Perhaps all kinds of electricity production in Texas will fall because of inadequate profits. Or someone will figure out that they need to subsidize the whole system, if they allow the current pricing system, with wind and solar allowed to go first.
Interesting .
HHH
IGNORED
06/29/2024 at 6:34 pm
Back during the Great Recession 2008-2009 the amount of unrealized losses sitting on the balance sheets of the banks just here in the US was about $75 billion.
Currently in 2024 the amount of unrealized losses on the balance sheets of the banks just here in the US is $675 billion.
At the end of the day liquidity is all about risk. Not central bank hand waving. If the commercial banks decide it’s too risky to lend then liquidity dries up.
All the QE and interest rate cuts in the world won’t matter if banks decide it’s too risky to make loans.
China is finding out that it doesn’t matter what rescue programs they try to put in place. They don’t matter if the banks and the general public believe their real estate market is too risky.
Asset prices can continue going up as long as banks and the public believe the risk involved is minimal. But as soon as it’s deemed too risky. Liquidity dries up and assets prices fall.
As assets are the collateral backing the loans . When asset prices go down these banks are going to eat the losses.
A lot of loan modifications going right now. They are trying their best to keep from having to mark assets to market.
When you are a bank and you are hemorrhaging you tend not to make new loans. Which puts further downward pressure on prices.
The capital needed to expand energy use is going to dry up.
HHH
IGNORED
06/30/2024 at 9:17 am
CRE buildings deflating is a global problem. As is unrealized losses on bank balance sheets.
I don’t have the numbers for Europe. But remember they had negative interest rates. I’d say it’s a pretty safe bet to say the total unrealized losses on European bank balance sheets is likely larger than the US banks.
>> When asset prices go down these banks are going to eat the losses.
You only need to eat a loss if you are forced to sell at a loss. With enough time, nominal prices for the collateral can go back up and banks never take the loss. That’s why central banks and regulators usually use the “extend and pretend” solution: just inflate the problem away.
At a certain stage you will have to take a hit on unrealized losses . Remember the Silicon Valley Bank crisis . I had earlier posted about the Japanese bank with all relevant details ( maybe Gail can repost ) but below is another link .
https://www.ctol.digital/news/norinchukin-bank-63b-sovereign-bonds-sale/
Here is my original post ,
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2024/06/22/the-advanced-economies-are-headed-for-a-downfall/comment-page-1/#comment-461967
Unless SVB loans were backed by real-estate collateral, it’s not a good comparison. Real estate (and all assets) goes up geometrically because inflation steals a percentage each year. So eventually banks will be made whole in nominal terms. When banks make bad loans, what determines bank failure is the nature of the collateral, whether depositors start bank runs, and whether the relevant regulator makes the call to terminate the bank through acquisition.
I am not sure if inflation works this way on real estate. Real estate prices have been pumped up by falling interest rates. When interest rates go up, the tendency is for real estate prices to fall.
https://macro-alchemist.mykajabi.com/
This was recommended by George Gammon (Rebel Capitalist) … it essentially states that China’s property market has been driving the world’s property market… and its all coming undone for just about every reason we are aware of. People in China have over borrowed immensely, have a shrinking population … and now need to sell over seas assets (houses). Higher interest rates are destroying the consumer… and that is driving businesses out of business… everywhere.
You need to sign up for the PDF to deliver. Its 50 pages with charts etc.
Thanks! Yes, I like George Gammon’s analyses.
I hadn’t thought about China’s property problems spreading worldwide, but I suppose it is possible.
This is in response to the post below.
“JavaKinetic says:
July 1, 2024 at 2:01 pm
https://macro-alchemist.mykajabi.com/
This was recommended by George Gammon (Rebel Capitalist) … it essentially states that China’s property market has been driving the world’s property market… “I doubt China began the real estate asset inflation bubble.My hypothesis is that real estate price inflation began when the U.S. and all its allies turned their economies into service economy in the 1970s and they did this by making loans easier to obtain for all kinds of purchases but especially for housing.
A quick search by DuckDuckGo shows brings up a chart that shows that home prices increased with the economy and were never really harmed by recessions until 2008 , which was more caused by lower lending standards in the U.S. than by Chinese over-borrowing. The property the Chinese citizens bought was with cash or t-bills provided by the U.S. which was only possible because of the imbalance of trade the U.S. (and other countries that trade in U.S. dollars) has with China.
Sure, China could have saved that money and put it in lockbox that would prevent them from buying assets and resources they needed. Since there are excessive dollars in circulation, that money had to be spent on something aside from industrial and military investments. That leaves real estate, education and healthcare…My impression was that money had to be spent and there was a lot of discouragement from economists to merely “save”.
I agree that willingness of banks to make loans is an important variable. I also agree that once citizens (and banks) start seeing housing prices drop, there is a different dynamic.
There are no doubt other things involved. Bank regulations, for example, and extent to which people are moving and defaulting on their outstanding loans. When banks can see actual losses occurring, they become especially frightened.
Wolf Richter explains why the US economy is doing as well as it is:
https://wolfstreet.com/2024/06/28/consumer-incomes-transfer-receipts-spending-saving-and-inflation/
Our Drunken Sailors Leaving the Party? Nah, Not Yet: Incomes, Transfer Receipts, Spending, Saving, and Inflation
https://wolfstreet.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/us-consumer-PCE-2024-06-28-disposable-income.png
By the way, I am back home after the wedding in the Minneapolis area now.
Glad to hear you are back safe and seen reports of delays and cancellations. Hope the festivities and ceremony was well received by all.
Things went well. I am one of seven children. We were all at the event, the first time this has happened since 1993, which is 31 years ago. The wedding photographer took a photo of the seven of us together. I haven’t seen it yet.
This is a photo I found on Facebook of the seven of us. I am at the right end of the group, since I am oldest.
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10160805787324504&set=pcb.10160805797929504
Thank you 🙏…strong family resemblance among you all.
Betcha you all were saying 1993, how quickly the years have passed.
Different combinations of us have gotten together many times over the years, and I talk with each of my siblings from time to time on the phone. It has just been that when we have gotten together before, one or another had an illness, or their spouse had an illness, making travel impossible. My parents, in their later years, when they were in assisted living, continued to pay for their townhouse for out of town relatives to get together in. My sister Diane took care of the townhouse for them. That made get togethers easy and convenient.
I’ve read this guy before he is an arrogant prick. He likes to pick and choose his data points.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/making-sense/id1506469669?i=1000660540990
I think we are going the other way but time will tell
I think the big issue is the wage disparity. Those who were originally doing fairly well are still doing well. In fact, if they are getting interest payments, they are doing even better.
It is the poor people who are getting more and more stressed out by everything going wrong. Even if total disposable income is going up, it is not getting down to the folks who were not doing well before. And many people have lots of debt to repay, sometimes now at higher interest rates.
when the US yearly adds say $4 trillion to its debt, then (using 5% interest rate) its yearly debt payments go up by about $200 billion.
“only” $200 billion.
the US growth in GDP last year (maybe fake) was about $700 billion.
this is why “they” run big deficits, because it works for now.
for now.
this will keep up the moderate inflation, and the average person will gradually get poorer.
surplus energy must decrease and the average person must get poorer, so what’s the big deal if the way they get poorer is through moderate inflation?
degrowth must happen.
Statista says:
“As of May 2024, the United States government has a monthly interest rate of 3.27 percent on its debt, continuing an upward trend in interest rates that began at the beginning of 2022. In April 2024, U.S. debt reached 34.62 trillion U.S. dollars.”
If the average interest rate keeps going up, as the new debt added is closer to 5% per year,, this adds to the interest burden as well. This is another reason why more debt is needed.
Higher FED interest rates on US Treasuries/MoneyMarkets ( 5-5.5%) should result in higher foreign capital inflows in search of higher yields, especially since the USD is still hanging on to “Reserve Currency” status. Are these inflows enough to offset the increased borrowing by the US Treasury?
This is Brent Johnson’s “Milkshake theory.” That the US will suck up the world’s capital.
If all this incoming cash is being consumed by interest payments, then paradoxically could inflation be kept in check?
Not if officials find it necessary to borrow more and more money, to try to stimulate the economy in this scenario. Somehow, the money has to get back to ordinary consumers. It is not clear that inflows from foreign investors will get back to the pockets of ordinary consumers.
The only possible future without falling into barbarism is an extremely right wing, merciless and cruel future, death squads everywhere, and it will make North Korea look like a bastion of freedom.
That is the only possible future, with extreme coercion, extreme repression and extreme control.
it’s the only possible future you can see with your warped mind.
there are many possible futures for humanity, and whatever future turns into actual reality will have been human destiny.
Kulm is projecting the most likely, most imminent future. There probably will be future after that. It’s pretty easy to predict future close to now. The further away from present one tries to project understanding the margin of error grows geometrically. Weather is seasonal/cyclical and in Ag Zone 5b, MI, USA: >48 hours out temperature predictions are off by >5%, precipitation is but a guess. But <24 hours they can predict microstorms down to the minute. Any attempts at modelling anything larger or smaller than a human are folly (yet fundamental human concerns). The further you get from human the less precise those models get. climate models. viral spread models.
What isn't overt about "progressing" to the "future"? Progress started before any individual human's perception and deification of it. The future is something that we all seem to believe in despite not being able to know.
We will see violently authoritarian regimes. We will experience some definable catastrophe. There will be scavenging. There will be evolutionary opportunity. There will be continuous predicaments. There will be life.
Silver lining
Kulm will be one of the first to go.
No need for more sociopaths.
Test. Black Mirror.
all is ready, agent Z.
operation Black Mirror now underway.
In June it fell mainly on the spoon, but in July it will be truly unruly.
start code Z:
I trust that in August there must be lusty disgust at the thrust of the crusty operation which must not be hampered by dust and rust and gusts of wind.
end code Z.
AI scientist Ray Kurzweil: ‘We are going to expand intelligence a millionfold by 2045’
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/29/ray-kurzweil-google-ai-the-singularity-is-nearer
Mr. Kurzweil claims:
“My first plan is to stay alive, therefore reaching longevity escape velocity. I take about 80 pills a day to help keep me healthy. Cryogenic freezing is the fallback. I’m also intending to create a replicant of myself [an afterlife AI avatar], which is an option I think we’ll all have in the late 2020s. I did something like that with my father, collecting everything that he had written in his life, and it was a little bit like talking to him. [My replicant] will be able to draw on more material and so represent my personality more faithfully.”
This putative “replicant” resembles the one in the Black Mirror episode that was entitled “Be Right Back”. It was a funny and well-written episode.
“The episode tells the story of Martha (Hayley Atwell), a young woman whose boyfriend Ash Starmer (Domhnall Gleeson) is killed in a car accident. As she mourns him, she discovers that technology now allows her to communicate with an artificial intelligence imitating Ash, and reluctantly decides to try it.”
This is a plan to sell more books. The article says:
And meanwhile, the “average American” has an IQ of 85.
And half of them have a lower IQ than that!
I see a lot of scope for natural selection. But of course it does not work like that.
Yes, according to Carlin.
That would be the average African-American. Fortunately White and Asian Americans have an average IQ at least one standard deviation higher than 85. Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ approximately two standard deviations above the A-A average.
Just because a group of people is smart does it meant they use their intelligence to benefit people outside that group.
Remember, until very recently, the “strong” conquered the weak.
As for AI, I think we should have stuck with the Tamagotchi. I asked my sister if she’d ever had a Tamagotchi. She replied, “Yes! It wasn’t mine, though. I was looking after it for a friend while she was on holiday. I accidentally knocked it into a cup of tea, and it screamed when it fell in!” Her husband chimed in, “Yes, I remember that. Its scream was really loud!” My sister concurred.
I asked her if the Tamagotchi still worked after that. “No, that killed it.” I asked her if her friend was annoyed. “No, she had a good laugh about it. She thought it was hilarious!”
So a Tamagotchi could scream. I never knew that.
Semantics now.
French far-right candidate faces prosecution for election campaign poster demanding a ‘future for white children’ after horrified mayor lodges complaint with authorities
https://archive.is/w8Ici#selection-1121.0-1121.169
Here is the poster:
https://archive.is/w8Ici/5cd5c2a4e3081e98d57d446e6c2dcafd161c0369.avif
“Let’s give a future to white children”, it reads.
The poster was signed off by Pierre-Nicolas Nups of the ‘Parti de la France’.
Here is a photo of Monsieur Nups:
https://archive.is/w8Ici/a87991797d79a6f2229af6162eff86568b6eddff.avif
So what do the image and the slogan suggest? Some say they are reminiscent of posters by a certain Austro-German party of the 1920s to 1945. Could be. I can see that.
What else? “Let’s give a future to white children”. Does this suggest they don’t have one? And if not, why not? Is the current French government to blame? Are “white children” perhaps being discriminated against? Or are they in fact culturally or biologically or genetically inferior and therefore in need of positive discrimination? The poster doesn’t say.
Does the poster suggest “Let’s give a future to white children” only and to no other children? No. Just as the phrase “Black lives matter” did not suggest that “white” lives do not matter. And when some English people sing “God save the King”, they do not imply that God (if he exists) should save the King and nobody else. So given all that, I suggest that the attempted complaint against the poster will not be successful.
Around 1980 I was talking to a Frenchman who was visiting London. He had mid-brown hair but his two sons, aged 9 and 10, were very blond. For some reason I had assumed that they would be Czech or Slovak, since I had noticed from some films that Czechoslovakia seemed to have a lot of blondies. The father told me that they were all from Lyon, in France. Not stereotypical French looks perhaps, but it just goes to show that you can’t generalise. And Pierre-Nicolas Nups of the ‘Parti de la France’ most definitely does not share such blond looks, though of course blond hair often darkens with age, usually to mid or dark-brown.
A question now. Does Marine Le Pen have naturally blonde hair? Or does she dye it?
When there is not enough to go around, there is more of a problem with who gets what is available.
Around here, there seem to be a lot of marriages between people of different races. Race seems to be more and more blurred.
This guy is nuts and should be in an asylum .
”Kurzweil admits that he cared little for his health until age 35, when he was found to suffer from a glucose intolerance, an early form of type II diabetes (a major risk factor for heart disease). He then found a doctor, Terry Grossman, who shared his unconventional beliefs and helped him to develop an extreme regimen involving hundreds of pills, chemical intravenous treatments, red wine, and various other methods to attempt to extend his lifespan. In 2007, Kurzweil was ingesting “250 supplements, eight to 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea” every day and drinking several glasses of red wine a week in an effort to “reprogram” his biochemistry.[53] By 2008, he had reduced the number of supplement pills to 150.[30] By 2015, Kurzweil further reduced his daily pill regimen to 100 pills.[54]
Kurzweil asserts that in the future, everyone will live forever.[55] In a 2013 interview, he said that in 15 years, medical technology could add more than a year to one’s remaining life expectancy for each year that passes, and we could then “outrun our own deaths”. Among other things, he has supported the SENS Research Foundation’s approach to finding a way to repair aging damage, and has encouraged the general public to hasten their research by donating.[27][56]”
I agree that Kurzweil sounds nuts. Your comment seems to have landed in the wrong place, but it is hard to fix it now.
I’m sure Ray Kurzweil is a mate of fellow transhumanist Keith Henson.
I wonder if he drinks his own urine? That would allow him to cut down on the number of pills and powders he has to take every day.
How are they going to do reparations there? I hear the left pushing that a lot lately. It will only cost about 15 trillion. That doesn’t include the west 😣
from a leading research university journal….”XXXX YYYY’s research focuses on the energy industry, largely the management of the trading operations of merchant energy firms. Last summer he took on a new role…to the dean on the energy transition, as the world looks toward the industry’s inevitable transformation.”
It is sad that all US research has now been corrupted by Fed money and resulting groupthink. Money destroys everything, including the ability of researchers to think.
I agree with you that taking money corrupts a site. That is a major reason I do not take donations. It is easy for authors to slant what they write to what readers want. Also, it suddenly make recopying a post on other websites more of a problem.
Why Does it Feel Like Everything is Dying in New Zealand?
“Last month, New Zealand Fashion Week 2024 was cancelled. And sure, not everyone cares about fashion. Sure, you could call it an often-reductive, rich-kids-showing-off-their-“jobs” convention. Sure, it’s fair to say that for most New Zealanders losing out on Fashion Week won’t be encouraging them to give up on their lives entirely. But Fashion Week getting lobotomised is indicative of something many of us can feel but no one wants to admit: Everything is dying in New Zealand.
Just this year, Nest Fest, Welcome to Nowhere, Beacon, 121 Festival and Splore music festivals were all either postponed or packed up for good. Making money and securing artist bookings proved too big a stumbling block. Large-scale community events like the 2024 NZ Agricultural Show, Hawkes Bay Arts Festival and Queenstown Winter Festival have also been cancelled. Even the shit your grandparents were looking forward to has died on the vine.
And it’s not just annual events that are disappearing before our eyes, either. Major local clothing designer and retailer Kate Sylvester shut down business after 31 years and fair-trade store Trade Aid closed all 24 of its shops.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ak39n4/why-does-it-feel-like-everything-is-dying-in-new-zealand
Prices have surged in recent years, and New Zealand has a population of just over 5 million, so it lacks the economies of scale that countries with significantly larger populations have.
Also, NZ is stuck out in the Pacific Ocean, more than a thousand miles from Oz, it’s nearest neighbour. So you can see why things are expensive there, if they can’t be made at home. With any luck, the Kiwis can build a Tube line to Tonga, in case they fancy buying a coconut, or else build their own version of the Channel Tunnel to Australia. The Pacific Tunnel, it’d have to be called. We could get our Norman to write the instruction manual for them. Sorted! Respect due. 🙂
Sounds like an ideal place to prep and bug out…sarcasm..
If you are a cannibal or enjoy a leg of lamb..sarcasm
writing is a cultivated skill zemi
how much do you get paid for doing it?
I know that, Norbert, and I even know how and when to use capital letters. I was indeed paid for writing articles for a hobbyist magazine, from 2014 to 2023.
I gave it up when they got a new deputy editor, who insisted on over-editing my prose. For instance, she pulled two of my sentences into one and separated them with a semi-colon. I regard semi-colons as pretentious and adhere to the KISS principle.
On one occasion I quoted a text that showed numbers as numerals, so when discussing the text, I likewise used numerals for consistency. The new deputy editor changed my numerals to words but left all the numerals as they were in the quoted text. I refused to send them any more articles after this witless interference.
Tainter in his book has said that islands are the most vulnerable to collapse when the ships coming in have to return empty . NZ and UK are prime examples . I am talking about container cargo ‘s . LNG and VLCC’S inevitably return empty . Welcome to Japan , South Korea , Taiwan etc . What a web we weave ? Tks IATM and Zemi .
That is a good point about the problem of ships having to return empty. At one point, there was at least some “mixed paper and plastic” sent on return ships for supposed recycling from many rich countries. But this turned out to be totally not economic, and ceased, I think January 2018. Helped reduce trade.
Just a thought . The main exports of NZ are livestock ( lamb ) , meat and diary products . Livestock vessels are special , meat and diary products can be exported only via refrigerated ( reefers) containers . So this would imply that the regular containers bringing stuff to NZ must be leaving empty . NZ has no refineries and neither does Australia so presumably they are importing finished fuels from SE Asia . Not a very comfortable situation .
Is that right? Hmmm, and that’s where Fast Eddy 😮 selected as his refuge fir collapse….run, Eddy, run
An awfully lot of oil needs to be used to get things transported out to New Zealand. When there is a short supply, New Zealand is a place easy to get cut out.
Eddy will, no doubt, find crunchy 😞 baked rat toasted delicious 😋🤤 when he looks like one of his doggie oics
Why a preemptive first strike is ‘necessary’?
“Remember when the narrative was that it was Russia totally reliant on Western-supplied parts in its weaponry? Here an American general literally admits the entire U.S. military structure would collapse in a day if China issued an embargo against them:
‘If we were in a war with China and it stopped providing parts, we wouldn’t be able to build the planes and weapons we needed,’ he said.
A startling report released earlier this year revealed Chinese firms have a stranglehold across 12 critical technologies that are vital to US national security, including nuclear modernization, hypersonic and space technologies.
The study, which was carried out by defense software firm Govini, delivered a damning indictment on the American armaments industry.
‘U.S. domestic production capacity is a shriveled shadow of its former self,’ the report said.
‘Crucial categories of industry for U.S. national defense are no longer built in any of the 50 states.’
Remember when it was Russia using Western chips in all of its missiles?
Perhaps most worryingly, Govini found that more than 40 per cent of the semiconductors that sustain Department of Defense (DoD) weapons systems are now sourced from China.”?
“Perhaps most worryingly, Govini found that more than 40 per cent of the semiconductors that sustain Department of Defense (DoD) weapons systems are now sourced from China.”?”
And many off the pharmaceutical prescription drugs in the US are sourced from China as well as car parts. We saw how well that worked out for the automotive industry when they couldn’t build cars because of a semiconductor shortage. They were sourced from China.
In case of a first strike all of this does not matter.
And the US keeps thinking that it can win!
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/sitrep-62924-bidens-unraveling-sets
it’s June 30th, tempus fugit.
Monday begins Q3.
in 6 months the 2020s will be half over.
from my house I can see 2025 on the horizon.
oh wait, is that the next Great Depression over there?
or maybe is it WW3?
how will I sleep tonight with so much bAU, baby?
No Great Depression by 2025 hmmmm… that’s a bold projection. From my front porch I can see a stretched consumer two men in diapers duelling it out for the presidency. A trillion in debt every two months…. Where do I buy those rose colored glasses???
now now don’t over exaggerate.
a trillion about every 4 months so the US is adding about 10% more debt per year on the $34 trillion debt.
in a couple years when it hits $40 trillion, they can keep adding 10% and it will be $4 trillion per year.
in the late 2020s it should be about $50 trillion and then they can add $5 trillion per year.
our money will be worth less due to moderate inflation.
yearly moderate inflation prevents hyperinflation and Great Depressions.
I am very sure you can still afford lots of unnecessary crraapp besides your essentials.
you can easily afford some rose colored glasses, I don’t have any but why don’t you check on Ammazzon?
“You will own nothing and you will be happy.”
Seems like Schwab was half right then.
our property remains with us.
though happiness comes and goes.
There seems to be more evidence that US home prices are peaking. In some places, they even are beginning to fall. Eventually, they will likely start creating problems for banks, but it takes a while.
China seems to already have a problem with falling home prices.
We wil have to wait and see how this turns out.
This is the best mBRIDGE explanation that I’ve seen. It’s a decentralized payment and settlement mechanism redesigned without the historical baggage that currently results in a slow and costly multi-party hierarchical system. mBRIDGE is still in the testing phase, but one thing that is notable is that central banks can update the ledger while commercial banks can read it. While there are “nodes” like the P2P bitcoin system, there’s no “proof of work” or “proof of stake” discussed. I’m guessing that the double-spend problem goes away if you have a limited known set of participants and then you can just use traditional public/private key pairs.
Human future would have been much brighter if mass consumption did not take place because the people were kept dirt poor.
Victorian style urban poor, stuck in their misery for ever and probably for the exit, and only the haves enjoy any kind of life.
Went to Fast Eddy’s substack, and he correctly describes the real situation of west before the World Wars.
Frankly speaking, too many people who had no stake on civilization enjoyed a lifestyle they did not deserve.
I no longer fear the so called deagle report which predicted a reduction of the pop of US and UK by 75%. The survivors are likely to be the better part of civilization, and that might actually help civilization
Half of the people in the ship will die – Rose ‘the Woke’ Butaker
Not the better half. – Caledon ‘Kulm the Status Quo’ Hockley.
The report says 2/3 population reduction in USA by 2025. Other places, I’ve read that in the event of nuclear war, 1/3 of the US population would be killed immediately, 1/3 would starve, leaving 1/3 … it’s probably just chance that the numbers match, but who knows. Given that the US doesn’t seem to want to take the L on Ukraine, maybe Russia decides that events will eventually escalate so it’s best to launch a preemptive first strike!
unfortunateley the world’s laws are about to change look at the chevron law it changed why are they changing ? Because the elders gave governments or the people they represent enough time and opportunity to get it right according to their models of policy change. What do the elders want now? They want to stop wasting the fossil fuels because there is not much left according to them . That way whatever is left will be carefully used on infrastructure that their policy models are promoting such as renewables or heat pumps yes finite worlders the elders are now in charge and they are bringing in their version of the great reset . A permanent lockdown is on the cards along with forced vaccinations on the “useless eaters” . According to one website the aim for world population is 4 billion in order to meet policy requirements for a sustainable future.
I don’t think we know what is ahead. We could be headed for a religious ending to our existence. We could be headed for a financial collapse. We could be headed for WWIII. The WEF seems to have still different ideas of what may be ahead.
The Chevron law takes away power from agencies and puts it back with legislators and judges. What’s that got to do with ‘elders’ and fossil fuels?
This is indeed one of his better posts
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/humans-as-malnourished-diseased-riddled
no good will come of resurrecting the dead ivan
i took the trouble of reading the first few lines
usual BS
i quote””’
In the centuries before humans worked out how to feed 8+ billion using petro chemical inputs a great many humans would have been in the same situation as a 3rd world street dog.””
fact is pre civilisation humans were 6” taller than us.
it was cities and streets that caused disease–people too close together—just like chickens and pigs, native american peoples had no immunity to those diseases of overcrowding.
crowds make a few wealthy, and the majority poor.
feeding 8bn was incremental over the last 3 centuries,
Think you are being too hard on the o,d boy and give him some slack as he did here with others.
I took it as he meant for it to be read….before BAU and fossil fuel use of coal and oil…
Not really a bad write up of Eddy’s and the pictures made his point.
Only thing missing was one of Hoolio ….
His avatar of actor Marty Feldman reflects “Why so serious?” Joker of his blog..
Does it really matter now of the being right in all aspects? We get so wrapped up in the details.
Such is the tragedy of Existence
Norman and Eddy have been sparring since way back before Norman was in his eighties. Neither one will ever give the other any quarter, or even a a dime.
I could pick Norman’s post apart like a chicken bone, or Eddie’s piece, for that matter, although it would be pointless since blog posts are not even supposed to be as closely argued or as well spelt and punctuated as, for instance, philosophical tracts or patent applications.
I will point out one humongous factual error in Norman’s comment though, for general edification rather than in order to correct Norman’s mistake—as experience has shown that Norman seldom recognizes that he makes mistakes. I do this as a public service, although I admit I am being rude in contradicting my elder and better.
This is my point:
Regarding “pre civilization humans”, according to archaeological evidence, the average height of Europeans living in the last few millennia before the dawn of agriculture was generally shorter than in more recent historical periods. During the Paleolithic era, when humans lived as hunter-gatherers, the average height for men was around 165-170 cm (5’5″ to 5’7″) and for women around 155-160 cm (5’1″ to 5’3″).
This relatively short stature is thought to be due to a few factors:
Diet – The hunter-gatherer diet, while nutritious, likely provided fewer calories compared to the more calorie-dense agricultural diet that emerged later. This could have limited overall growth potential.
Physical activity levels – The active hunter-gatherer lifestyle, with frequent long-distance travel and physically demanding activities, may have diverted energy away from growth and development.
Genetic factors – Populations that had adapted to particular regional environments over many generations may have developed genetic tendencies toward shorter average heights in order to better survive on the limited nutrition provided by the local food supply.
As agricultural “civilized” societies emerged and human diets became more calorie-rich, average heights began to increase gradually over subsequent millennia. But the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers were generally quite a bit shorter on average compared to modern European populations.
Norman, if you would like me to go to the labour of elaborating about the Pigmies and the Masai and the “Hobbits” of Flores, Indonesia, or the natives of Tasmania or Tierra del Fuego< just let me know.
And before you start huffing and puffing and bluffing and too-ing and fro-ing and sliding out of what you claimed, let me direct you to some of the "scienceTM" on the subject:
Here are a few key academic papers that provide scientific evidence and analysis on the heights of Paleolithic populations in Europe:
"Stature Estimation from Long Bone Lengths in the European Holocene"—Ruff (2002):
This study examined skeletal remains from Paleolithic and Neolithic sites across Europe, estimating average statures. The results indicate Paleolithic foragers were on average 5-10 cm shorter than later agricultural populations.
"Stature in European and Mediterranean Neolithic and Mesolithic Populations"—Katina Lillios (1992):
This comprehensive review article compiles data from multiple archaeological sites, concluding that Mesolithic (pre-agricultural) populations in Europe were generally shorter than Neolithic (early agricultural) groups.
"Stature and Body Mass Estimation from Skeletal Remains in the Ancient Balkans"—Djurić et al. (2007):
This paper focused on skeletal remains from the Balkans, finding Mesolithic individuals were around 5 cm shorter on average than those from the later Neolithic period.
"Stature Estimation in Prehistoric Skeletons: An Analysis of the Calculation Methods"— Formicola and Giannecchini (1999):
This methodological study validates the techniques used to estimate Paleolithic statures from long bone lengths, providing confidence in the conclusions drawn across multiple archaeological investigations.
Well. Our advancement in science regarding genetic engineering of DNA will provide a solution to the barriers facing humankind in the next phase of civilization advancement, along with integrated AI mind melt of the consciousness to which will bring a universal connection of all people that eliminates all conflict and misunderstanding to usher in a utopia here on Earth..right Klummie?
It was the advent of meat eating, milk drinking, cheese making herding peoples that drove really large frame size humans. Yamanaya will not be denied.
One must ignore of course the earlier occurrence of sterile “nephilum” giants that resulted from neanderthal (or maybe H. erectus) crossbreeding with “the women of men” to create the base for the biblical tales of crazed giants rampaging across the landscape eating everyone in their path.
I know, I know……..how ridiculous right?
“fact is pre civilisation humans were 6” taller than us.”
Our Normal only says that because he’s a Bible scholar. As the Bible noted:
“There were giants in the earth in those days”
There are anthropologists that say that as well.
Of course Eddy referred to the agricultural era. Norman, as is his custom, takes things out of context. Of course American Indians and Mongols were much larger than agricultural people.
North America:
Pains Indians: Studies of skeletal remains from archaeological sites across the Great Plains region indicate the nomadic hunter-gatherer populations had average male heights around 170-175 cm (5’7″ to 5’9″).
Agricultural societies: In contrast, remains from sites of more sedentary agricultural societies in the Eastern Woodlands and Southwestern regions suggest average male heights were typically 5-10 cm shorter, around 165-170 cm (5’5″ to 5’7″).
Central America/Andes:
Maya: Skeletal remains indicate average male heights around 165-170 cm (5’5″ to 5’7″)
Aztec: Studies suggest average male heights of 160-165 cm (5’3″ to 5’5″)
Andean Region (South America):
Inca: Estimates from skeletal analyses point to average male heights of 162-168 cm (5’4″ to 5’6″)
Other Andean populations: Generally in the range of 160-165 cm (5’3″ to 5’5″) for males
Amazon Basin:
Indigenous hunter-gatherer groups: Average male heights around 165-170 cm (5’5″ to 5’7″)
Agricultural societies: Somewhat shorter, around 160-165 cm (5’3″ to 5’5″) for males
Overall: Hunter gatherers a bit taller than agriculturalists.
“Ah,” but you may say, “Surely the Aztecs were civilized. And surely they were shorter than the hunter gatherers?”
Well, yes and no. Some of the Aztecs were very civilized and were polite and genteel in demeanor. Others were brutes, quite frankly.
When we examine the archaeological evidence, it emerges that among the Aztecs:
Nobility:
Average male heights estimated around 165-170 cm (5’5″ to 5’7″)
Commoners/Workers:
Average male heights tended to be around 160-165 cm (5’3″ to 5’5″)
So the more civilized ones were taller, just like almost everywhere else, which supports Kulm’s assertion that in recent decades the commoners/workers who make no contribution to civilization have been over-fed and under-bled, so to speak, allowing them to grow by unprecedented amounts both vertically and horizontally.
Oh no! Some uppity countries seem to be taking into account first their own citizens and repudiating the glorious future of globalised free trade.
Quick, call in the cleanup squad
theedgemalaysia.com/node/717307
Indonesian trade minister: The planned import duties average more than 100%, Trade Minister Zulkifli Hasan told reporters on Friday. “If we are flooded with (imported goods), our micro, small and medium enterprises could collapse.”
Planned de-growth. Smart. Happens everywhere.
In your face.
Time for a regime change in Malaysia
These tariffs are on stuff that isn’t usually considered very important either economically or geo-strategically. From the article:
>> Duties will be imposed soon and could affect imports of footwear, clothing, textiles, cosmetics and ceramics, Zulkifli said.”
For reasons of employment they’re important domestically. To me the significance of the change is they’re bucking the western agenda, which is quite brave considering they’ve been a prototype laboratory for “colour change” (see Bevins, V The Jakarta Method, 2020) since the sixties.
Right at the present they’re about to install their newly elected president, an ex army general, along with the previous president’s son as VP. It leads me to wonder whether they may not have been listening to the other side and, worse, wavering …
Agreed. But without imports, it is difficult to have very complete supply chains for a whole lot of industries. It is possible/likely that population will have to fall to be sustainable by the reduced amount of goods and services that can be provided.
” I once had a Spanish general staff officer worked closely with me at
1:23:25
shape headquarters he was wonderful and he used to say you know Douglas America is not a country it’s a
1:23:34
planet and he wasn’t wrong most Americans and if you travel across this country I’m not talking about the big
1:23:41
Urban centers like New York La Philadelphia because those are so radically different now it’s hard to
1:23:48
even count them but if you go out Beyond them in the country in the rest of the country most Americans just want to live
1:23:55
they’re not interested in any of this they don’t know where most of it is our education has failed us badly over the
1:24:01
last several decades most Americans don’t understand the world they have no sense of geography “?
The REAL Reason Saudi Left The Dollar
By now you must have heard that Saudi Arabia is leaving the US dollar and the Petro Dollar agreement. But just how true is that information?
That’s exactly what I’ll break down + what the next step is for Saudi & why they made this major move.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_9mhmFG_qjc
Mike Moss explains the whole dynamics of what’s ahead in the formation of a new world reserve payment system and the how it will affect the Dollar in years ahead.
About 20 minutes long but he pretty much does a complete explanation.
Can anyone refer me to any official source that says Saudi is leaving the dollar or ended a treaty? I read on RT a few days ago that there is no such formal agreement or treaty and the news just started as an internet rumor that caught fire.
‘Falsehood will fly from Maine to Georgia, while truth is pulling her boots on.’
This 20 minute video explains some of what the problem is. There is also a 38 minute video added in a different comment above by ivanislav that explains some more of what it going on, which I haven’t finished listening to.
With the electrical system of the world becoming shakier and shakier, I am skeptical the mBridge digital currency system can really work for very long. If countries aren’t woking well together, this will add to the problems. There is also the underlying problem of a lack of goods and service to buy, no matter how much money seems to be available. We are likely to encounter a lot of International default on debt, further making the system hard to operate.
So far, I am in the “skeptical it will work,” or “skeptical it will work for very long” camp.
First , there was no ‘ agreement ‘ , it was a tactic ‘ understanding ‘ . 50 years ago was the period of the cold war . It was US security in lieu of recycling the KSA surplus into treasuries .
The Petro dollar is not the reserve currency , the US dollar is the reserve currency . Today , the cold war is over , Russia is a partner with KSA in OPEC+ , US is in decline , KSA does not have a surplus to recycle into treasuries .
The CBDC outlined cannot be implemented as mentioned due to the electrical grid issue . Further KSA has the same problem as China —it cannot offload its dollar holdings en masse without crashing the full financial system . About $ 700 billion of the Saudi Sovereign wealth fund is invested in US assets . KSA is the largest shareholder in Citibank . The Riyal is pegged to the USD . The Saudi Central Bank is a proxy for the FED .
P.S ; Not many know that Swiss National Bank ( SNB ) has the highest percentage of Apple shares in it’s portfolio .
>> The CBDC outlined cannot be implemented as mentioned due to the electrical grid issue .
It can be implemented as long as there are computers and the internet. Are you saying these will disappear in the next 10 or 15 years?
Yes . The three legs of the stool called Industrial civilization are oil , electricity and metals . Once one leg goes the whole stool falls down . I have mentioned several times the complexity of the PPS ( Petroleum Production System ) in getting the crude in KSA to gasoline in the F 150 of Six Pack Joe . The complexity of the Electricity delivery system is twice more complex . I sometimes wonder that it has held up so well till now . Well ,no electricity or even unreliable ( intermittent) electricity means no internet/ computers . Grids are failing in many countries in the periphery . I had posted links to this earlier .
I will make a note to remind you in 2034 of just how wrong you were 🙂
Good read . Gail referred .
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2024/06/28/the-real-threat-to-our-security/
I agree. One thing from the post:
Tim quotes from the Maximum Power Principle statements at the end of my current post.
No this statement is wrong! As long as you can borrow money the same game plays out but that is ending faster than you think! The U.s is slipping into a recession hole there will be no easy money until after the election by then it will be in a full blown depression. When the idiot Americans look around and figure out what happened then it will be anyone guess. I don’t see any leader surviving unless they can fabricate a war . Maybe invade Venezuela or Canada next. The Permian is drying up. Does anyone else see large fluctuations in gas prices lately? I see it dropping.50 one day and then up .80 later in the week. Strange.
the “next” Great Depression is always a year away.
good idea about VZ, the USA military surely knows that there is lots of high quality heavy oil in VZ if/when the time comes to make up an excuse where the USA must invade VZ for the sake of democracy or some such PR.
It’s always a year away? No david we have been in a silent depression since 2008 . The only reason why you haven’t felt it is because of 30 trillion in government debt. If you take that away then there you have it
US debt is probably going to $100 trillion.
then there you have it.
The oil in VZ will remain in the ground , not even aliens can make it flow . Already touched on the technical issues several times . Will the last man switch off the lights in VZ ?
http://www.aer.ca link.
“How In Situ Technology Works
There are two main thermal in situ oil sands technologies:
steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD)
cyclic steam stimulation (CSS)
In SAGD, two horizontal wells are drilled about five metres apart, one over top of the other. Steam is injected into the top well, which heats the bitumen until it’s mobile enough to flow to the lower well.”
“In CSS, steam is injected into a vertical or horizontal well with enough pressure to fracture the rock, which allows the steam to move rapidly into the reservoir. This heats the bitumen and reduces its viscosity, allowing it to flow more easily. The bitumen can then be moved to the surface using the same well.”
if you care to answer, why does this work so well for Canada with their 6+ mbpd but it can’t possibly work in VZ?
much thanks in advance for your answer.
SITU and SAGD work only if you have cheap Natural gas to create steam or surplus cheap electricity . Canada has the both available while VZ does not .
Ravi, a couple of questions if you don’t mind.
Didn’t you previously say that Venezuelan oil had a better viscosity than Canadian, so more workable?
If local gas/electricity supply was the issue that stops it coming out the ground, how did they manage to pump it profitably, before the U.S sanctioned them out of business and why wouldn’t they just burn some of that oil to produce all the electricity needed?
They seemed to be doing fine, right up to the point they said, hey Yankee corporations we’re keeping the lions share of our oil now. Then it all changed. Sanctions, assassination attempts and Juan Guaidó make me wonder what all that effort was for.
“f you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won’t.”
Hyman G. Rickover
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tG7hh-Vx2A
The economic situation and the oil industry of Venezuela.
Zeihan is a pro-Western analyst so in general one must take his words with a pinch of salt.
In any case, even if we wanted to start a massive extraction from the Orinoco basin, production would not reach the market for at least 10/12 years, at minimum.
If we take as an example the latest giant field discovered in Norway, Johan Sverdrup, 9 years have passed from discovery to production, in an area with an existing infrastructure.
FF , ” Didn’t you previously say that Venezuelan oil had a better viscosity than Canadian, so more workable?”
You are mistaken . I said it was the other way around . VZ is worse than Canada .
Chavez died in 2013 and Venezuela was under sanctions since about 2008 . So 17 years now , The system is broken . It pumps oil with cannibalization of the old infrastructure . I can go on , but not needed because Gian has provided some details . When Zeihan whom I call ” Jim Cramer of geo politics” says it is a useless endeavor to resurrect VZ oil industry then who am I to argue ?
Maybe they could heat up that heavy VZ oil with nukes, to make it liquid, then pump it out really fast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXAsWdzLRyI
The link that I posted before was wrong, my bad.
Here is the correct one regarding the Venezuela situation.
Btw I agree with you Ravi, it has been more than a decade since the revision of Venezuela’s oil reserves where around 200 billion barrels of heavy oil were added, and the production has fallen steeply.
It’s not only a matter of resources to have in the ground.
Political stability, and reliable infrastructure are needed to extract whatever resources.
Nigeria has a lot of oil potential geologically speaking, but production has also been decreasing for years.
Same for Somalia, a lot of seismic work has been done with the identification of source rock and potential accumulation formations but if you don’t drill a well you will never know the reality of the basin.
Plus, as I said before, you need stability and lots of billions for infrastructures that allow hydrocarbons to reach the consumers.
As far as I can judge, we are entering an era of big geopolitical chaos where a lot of potential resources will stay in the ground.
JJ, indeed, if we nuke the oil first then it will be higher energy and give better mpg too
All kinds of strange ideas. But our vehicles and other devices are built for a particular kind of oil product.
Tim Watkins’ pieces are always a breath of reality since he is one of the few among the vast majority of the population to understand the close correlation between energy and the economy and how this affects the prosperity of populations.
The video he refers to in the article on the state of the United Kingdom (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5aJ-57_YsQ) is so eloquent that it leaves little room for positive thoughts about the future of many Western countries that they don’t have access to cheap fossil energy.
In one of the previous comments on this post, I read that Birmingham has declared bankruptcy, but it seems that the city was just the last one on the list. This article from the Guardian tells us that one in five of England’s councils will probably be insolvent by next year.
The resources to keep basic services running are drying up it seems.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/14/englands-councils-bankrupt-westminster
After all…coal extraction has basically ended, the offshore wind turbines are just an illusion with an expected lifetime of around 15 years, the small modular reactors seem to never reach commercialization.
Meanwhile, the North Sea is in severe decline. I keep track of the recent “important” fields that will go online shortly: Rosebank oil field discovered in 2004 (500 mln bbl of reserves), Cambo oil field discovered in 2002 (800 mln bbls), production target of the two fields is around 50-70.000 barrels per day. They are insufficient to stop the annual decline of around 10/12%. 60-70.000 bbls is the production that is lost year by year!
https://www.upstreamonline.com/finance/-cliff-edge-scenario-uk-oil-and-gas-production-to-nosedive-in-absence-of-new-investment-says-trade-group/2-1-1618324
Have no idea why this came up on YouTube.
CDC meeting, vaccines, RFK, Jr.
Seems Autism and vaccinations were linked. Apparently started in 1989.
I did not go back and check references.
Some here have experience with this issue.
We are trying too hard to fix things, nature has a way; it is not always comfortable.
Dennis L.
I know that at meetings for parents of children with autism, the possible link with vaccines was often discussed. The medical community would strongly deny that there was any possible link. A major effort of the medical community seemed to be to look for genetic issues, but this seemed absurd to me. Genetics don’t change overnight.
The changes with autism are strange. My (now) adult son with autism is a fairly high-paid computer programmer. He works from home because he cannot drive. Before 2020, he took a bus to downtown Atlanta to work. He does amazingly well at programming, despite his other deficiencies. So, it may be that some of the variations that are introduced actually are helpful in today’s complex society. He seems to “go with the flow” pretty well on group projects now. He knows that he will never be a leader, but he can do his part quickly and accurately.
Sure, but he might have been as good a programmer even if he didn’t have autism. The counterfactual history can never be tested. Likewise, is it the autism, or the downstream knock-on effects of having it? Social difficulty biases people towards solitary tasks like science and engineering. Apparently the CIA looks for people with insecurity, because that drives them to overachieve, which is analogous.
Thanks Gail to share your story.
The point that genetic aspects don’t appear suddenly overnight is really a key one.
Doctors are available to lean to any excuse than consider the variable ‘vaccine’ of the equation.
I’ve heard other stories about this kind of sudden change.
I would be interested to know the incidence of autism in places like Iran or Pakistan (or others), that is, in places where children don’t suffer the whole series of vaccines suffered by the typical western children (which by the way, now, they are many injections, in comparison to the ones of people born in the 60s or 70s).-
I found this:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/autism-rates-by-country
Not surprising, the US’s rate of autism is very high–perhaps highest in the world, but I didn’t look.
I was surprised that sub-Saharan Africa had as high an autism rate as it seems to. It is up there with France and some of Eastern Europe. The places where autism rates are very low are in a band across Northern Africa, the Middle East, and India.
It looks like the UK has the highest autism rate. I would think that level of diagnosis would make a difference too.
Yes, I also think that it depends on how Countries measure that, but for sub sharian Countries one can find various articles on the web that those Countries have been used many times as test labs.
That could be.
The linked article from A Midwestern Doctor published a year ago goes a long way to explaining how vaccination can cause both autism and Alzheimer’s disease.
It is a long read, but you gotta get up close to the teacher if you wanna learn anything:
One of the most challenging things for me throughout my time in the medical field has been watching children become neurologically damaged by vaccines, and the widespread blindness of the medical profession to this issue. Unfortunately, because so much money has been spent to engineer the societal belief that vaccines do not cause autism, anyone that asserts otherwise is immediately subject to widespread ridicule, to the point it’s mostly a lost cause to convince medical professionals vaccines aren’t always safe. In many cases, the only thing that can open their eyes is their own child being severely injured.
The business of using propaganda (public relations or PR) has gradually evolved into a more and more streamlined formula that reuses the PR techniques found to be the most effective for manipulating the public. Because of this, once the COVID-19 vaccine push started, those who already had firsthand experience with the PR techniques used to prop up the previous vaccinations immediately recognized that something bad was in the works. More importantly, since the exact same vaccine PR scripts were reused to gaslight those with COVID-19 vaccine injuries, it led many to begin questioning the earlier scripts, like those used to debunk any link between vaccines and autism.
Recently Steve Kirsch started looking at that question, and in an attempt to bring attention to the issue, raised three very important points:
1. Contrary to popular belief, there is actually a great deal of compelling evidence linking vaccines to autism. For example, regressive autism always develops shortly after vaccination—but never before, something that cannot happen unless one causes the other. Likewise, there is a significant amount of evidence correlating vaccine uptake with autism rates.
2. There is presently no accepted explanation for what is causing the explosion of autism we are facing.
3. The explosion of autism is one of the costliest diseases facing our country, so decades of hand waiving that has insisted there’s no scientifically valid explanation for this explosion doesn’t cut it.
You might notice how these three points mirror what we are now seeing with the massive wave of (often unmistakeable) side effects from the COVID-19 vaccines.
One of the major stumbling blocks in proving that vaccines could autism has been to explain their mechanism for doing so. In this article I will start by describing the most commonly cited mechanisms followed by the two‚ I believe play key roles in both vaccines causing autism and the current wave spike protein injuries. Since all of these mechanisms are interrelated, treating one often improves the others.
https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/how-do-vaccines-cause-autism
Agree.
Didn’t go to link, is this fellow from Il?Similar podcast on Kunstler.
Dennis L.
The knee-jerk response is not “no vaccination” but for scientists to improve vaccinations so the immune response does not cause damage.