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Where could the economy be headed now?
Today, there is great wage and wealth disparity, just as there was in the late 1920s. Recent energy consumption growth has been low, just as it was in the 1920s. A significant difference today is that the debt level of the US government is already at an extraordinarily high level. Adding more debt now is fraught with peril.
Where could the economy go from here? In this post, I look at some historical relationships to understand better where the economy has been and where it could be headed. While debt levels and interest rates are important to the economy, a growing supply of suitable inexpensive energy products is just as important.
At the end, I speculate a little regarding where the US, Canada, and Europe could be headed. Division of current economies into parts could be ahead. While the problems of the late 1920s eventually led to World War II, it may be possible for the parts that are better supplied with energy resources to avoid getting into another major war, at least for a while.
[1] Government regulators have been using interest rates and debt availability for a very long time to try to regulate how the economy operates.
I have chosen to analyze US data because the US is the world’s largest economy. The US is also the holder of the world’s “reserve currency,” allowing demand for the US dollar (really US debt) to stay high because of its demand for use in international trade.
Comparing Figure 1 and Figure 2, it is clear that there is a close relationship between the charts. In particular, the highest interest rate in 1981 on Figure 2 corresponds to the lowest ratio of US government debt to GDP on Figure 1.
Up until 1981, the changes in interest rates were either imposed by market forces (“You can’t borrow that much without paying a higher rate”) or else as part of an attempt by the US Federal Reserve to slow an economy that was growing too fast for the available labor supply. After 1981, the same market dynamics no doubt took place, but the overall attempt at intervention by the US Federal Reserve seems to have been in the direction of speeding up an economy that wasn’t growing as fast as desired.
In Figure 2, the 3-month interest rates correspond fairly closely to government target interest rates. The 10-year interest rates tend to move on their own, perhaps somewhat influenced by Quantitative Easing (QE), in which the US government buys back some of its own debt to try to hold down longer-term interest rates. These longer-term interest rates influence US long-term mortgage interest rates.
Recent monthly data show that 10-year interest rates started rising very quickly after reaching a minimum following the Covid response in early 2020. The lowest 10-year average rates took place in July 2020, and rates started moving up in August 2020.
This suggests to me that market forces play a significant role in 10-year interest rates. As soon as people started borrowing money to remodel or to move to a new suburban location, 10-year interest rates, and likely the related mortgage rates, started to drift upward again. If this observation is correct, the Federal Reserve has some control over interest rates, but it cannot adjust the 10-year interest rates underlying mortgages and other long-term debt by as much as it might like.
The apparent inability of the Federal Reserve to adjust longer-term interest rates to as low a level as it would like is concerning because the US government debt level is very high now (Figure 1). Being forced to pay 4% (or more) on long-term debt that rolls over could create a huge cash flow issue for the US government. More debt could be required simply to pay interest on existing debt!
[2] An analysis of actual growth in US GDP over time shows how successful the changing strategies in Figures 1 and 2 have been.
In the 1930s, the US and much of the rest of the world were in the Great Depression. Interest rates were close to 0% (not shown on Figure 2, but available from the same data). Various versions of the New Deal under President Roosevelt were started in 1933 to 1945. Social Security was added in 1935. Figure 4 shows that these programs temporarily increased GDP, but they did not entirely solve the problem that had been caused by defaulting debt and failing banks.
Entering World War II was a huge success for increasing US GDP (Figure 4). Many more women were added to the workforce, making munitions and taking over jobs that men had held before they were drafted into the army.
After the war was over, the total number of jobs available dropped greatly. Somehow, private sector growth needed to be ramped, using debt of some kind, to provide jobs for the returning soldiers and others left without work. An abundant supply of fossil fuels was available, if debt-based demand could be put into place to pull the economy along. Programs were put into place to get factories running again making goods for the civilian economy. Additional jobs and energy demand were created by upgrading the electrical grid, increasing pipeline infrastructure, and (in 1956) starting work on an interstate highway system.
During the period between 1950 to 2023, the average growth rate of the US economy gradually stepped downward, despite all of the debt-based stimulus that was being added after 1981, as shown in Figure 5.
[3] While growing debt is important for pulling an economy forward, a growing supply of energy is essential to actually produce physical goods and services.
Economic growth involves producing physical goods and services. The laws of physics tell us that energy supplies of the right types, in the right quantities, are necessary to make the goods and services that the physical economy depends upon.
The rate of growth of world energy supply has been stepping down over the years, as the easiest (and cheapest) to extract fossil fuels tend to get extracted first. The average rate of increase of all energy supply (not just fossil fuels) is shown in Figure 6:
Comparing Figures 5 and 6, we can see that average annual US GDP growth approximately matched growth in world energy supplies in the first two periods: 1950-1970 and 1971-1980.
In the period 1981-2007, average US GDP growth (of 3.2%) soared above world energy consumption growth (of 2.1%). I would attribute this primarily to outsourcing a significant share of the US’s industrial production as the economy shifted to becoming more of a service economy. There were multiple advantages to moving to a service economy. US oil supply had become restricted, and a service economy would use less oil. Also, the costs of imported goods would be much lower than those made in the US for several reasons, including more efficient newly built factories, lower-wage workers, and the use of inexpensive coal as a fuel instead of oil.
The encouragement of increased use of “leverage” under Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK no doubt added to the effect of using more debt shown in Figure 1. The US government started borrowing more money, rather than increasing taxes. Businesses became larger and more complex. International trade started playing a larger role.
Recent low growth in energy supplies has created an economic problem that added debt has only partially been able to hide. (In the latest period (2008-2023), both US average GDP growth (at 1.8%) and world energy consumption growth (at 1.5%) were very low.) Figure 1 shows that the US added huge amounts of debt, both after the 2008 financial crisis, and at the time of the Covid response in 2020. If it weren’t for these huge debt infusions, US GDP growth would no doubt have been much lower. GDP counts the quantity of goods and services produced, not whether added debt has been used to manufacture these goods, or whether customers have used debt to purchase these goods.
[4] In some ways, the world economy today is like the economy of the 1920s.
The 1920s were characterized by both the rising use of debt (especially consumer credit), and wide wage and wealth disparities. This was a time of innovation. Some farmers had modern new equipment that greatly enhanced efficiency, while most farmers could not afford this equipment.
Figure 7 shows a pattern of wage disparity that operates in precisely the opposite direction from the interest rate pattern shown in Figure 2. The lower the interest rates, the more the concentration of wealth among a very small portion of the population. The higher the interest rates, the more evenly wage and wealth is divided.
A comparison of Figure 7 with Figure 6 and Figure 5 shows that (at least for the years since 1950), faster energy consumption growth seems to lead to faster economic growth. With faster economic growth, the economy can support higher interest rates and higher wages for lower-paid workers. There is less push for “complexity” to try to replace workers with machines.
When energy consumption growth is low, the economy tends to grow more slowly. The interest rates that corporations and individuals can afford to pay are relatively low. With low interest rates, asset prices of all kinds soar because monthly payments to buy these assets fall. The prices of stocks, bonds, homes, and farms tend to soar. The already rich become richer and richer, as the poor are increasingly squeezed out of the economy.
Physicist Francois Roddier has said that physics dictates the outcome of widely diverging incomes when energy supply is low. It takes much less energy to supply an economy of a few rich people and many poor people than it takes to support an economy with relatively equal incomes. The vast majority of the supposed wealth of the rich exists as promises that can only be fulfilled in the future if there is enough energy of the right kinds to fulfill these promises. Their promised future wealth does not affect today’s energy use. While the energy use of rich people is somewhat higher than that of poor people, much of the difference disappears when a person considers the fact that much of their wealth is essentially “paper wealth” that may or may not actually be present as the future actually unfolds.
Both the 1920s and the latest period (2008-2023) are very low energy-growth periods. The fact that (2008-2023) is a low energy growth period (at 1.5% per year) can be seen on Figure 6. Energy supply was growing even slightly more slowly in the 1920s (based on data from Vaclav Smil’s Energy Transitions). Population was growing by 1.1% per year in both the 1920s and in the latest period (2008-2023.) Net energy consumption per capita growth was slightly negative (-0.1%) in the 1920s and only a very small positive percentage (0.4%) in the 2008-2023 period. Per capita consumption had been growing much more quickly between 1950 and 1980.
[5] The economy becomes very fragile when the growth of energy supply is low, compared to the growth of the world’s population.
Hidden beneath the surface is the problem that there is not enough energy to go around. This problem doesn’t manifest itself in high prices; it manifests itself in unusually large wage disparities. Very rich individuals (such as Bill Gates and Elon Musk) gain excessive influence. Special interests and their drive for profits also become important. At times, this drive for profits can come ahead of the well-being of citizens.
Citizens become more quarrelsome. Differences between and within political parties become greater. Political candidates no longer treat other candidates with the respect we would have expected in the past. The problem is, in some sense, the problem of a game of musical chairs.
Initially, the game has as many players as chairs. The players walk around the outside of the group of chairs as the music plays. In each round, one chair is removed and the players must scramble for the remaining chairs. The person who does not get a chair is eliminated from the game.
[6] It seems to me that major parts of the world economy are transitioning from a growth mode to a mode of shrinkage.
Figure 9 gives a representation of how the world’s growing economy can be visualized, and how it may change in the future.
The fact that growth in the consumption of fossil fuel energy supplies has been retreating to lower levels should be of concern (Figure 6). At some point, the world economy will be in a situation in which the amount of fossil fuels we can extract is falling. While we have some add-ons to the fossil fuel system (including hydroelectric, nuclear, wind, and solar), they are all manufactured using the fossil fuel system and repaired using the fossil fuel system. These add-ons would stop producing not long after the fossil fuel system stops producing. They need fossil fuels to make replacement parts, among other problems.
The amount of growth in energy supply determines the growth in physical goods and services that can be produced. In periods of rapid growth, borrowing from the future, even at a high interest rate, makes sense. In periods of low growth, only loans with a very low interest rate are feasible. When the economy is shrinking, very few investments can repay loans requiring interest.
Needless to say, repaying debt with interest becomes much more difficult in a shrinking economy. In the US, our underlying problem is that since 1981, the US’s financial policy has been “throw every tool in the tool box” at stimulating the economy. We are now running out of tools to stimulate the economy to grow faster. Adding more debt isn’t likely to work very well, or for very long.
At this point, the many government-funded investments aimed at providing green energy and offering transportation by electricity are not paying back well. Citizens are repeatedly being told that there is a need to move away from fossil fuels to prevent climate change. But world CO2 emissions continue to rise. They simply moved to a different part of the world.
[7] What does history since 1920 say may be ahead?
It is hard to see that things will turn out well, but we do know that historical civilizations have collapsed over a period of many years. We can hope that if we are facing the collapse of at least part of the world’s economy, this collapse will also be slow. Some intermediate steps along the line likely include the following:
(a) Stock market collapses. After excessive speculation in the stock market in the late 1920s, the stock market collapsed on October 29, 1929, starting the Great Depression. Another major crash occurred in 2008, during the Great Recession. Both of these speculative bubbles seem to have been fueled by low short-term interest rates.
(b) Drops in the prices of homes, farms, and other assets. The Great Depression is noted for major drops in the prices of farms. The Great Recession is known for major drops in the prices of homes. We are now facing a situation with far too much Commercial Real Estate. Its price logically should fall. Farmers are also having difficulty because wholesale food prices are too low relative to the various costs involved, including interest payments relating to equipment purchases and mortgages. The problem is especially acute if farm property has been purchased at currently inflated prices. The prices of farms logically should fall, also.
(c) Debt defaults, related to asset price drops. Banks, insurance companies, pension plans and many individuals owning bonds will be badly affected if defaults on loans or bonds start increasing. (In fact, even if the market interest rates simply rise, the carrying value on financial statements is likely to fall.) If commercial real estate or a farm is sold and the sales price is less than the outstanding debt, the bank issuing the loan will be left with a loss. This debt is often resold, with credit rating agencies falling short in indicating how risky the debt really is.
(d) Failing banks, failing insurance companies, and failing pension plans. Even bankrupt governments defaulting on their loans.
With failing banks, there is less money in circulation. The tendency is for commodity prices to fall very low, putting farmers in worse financial shape than before. They cut back on production. Food production and transport use considerable amounts of oil. Reduced food production leads to less need for oil consumption and thus, falling oil prices. With low oil prices, production tends to fall.
(e) If a government survives, it may try to issue much more debt-based money to try to raise prices. This might work if the country is able to produce all goods locally. But the huge amount of new money (and debt) will not be honored by other countries. The result is likely to be hyperinflation, and still no goods to buy.
(f) Persecution of the wealthier people blamed for society’s problems. If people are poor, and there aren’t enough goods to go around, there is a tendency to find someone to blame for the problem. In Europe, prior to World War II, the Nazis persecuted the Jews. The Jews were often rich and worked in finance or the jewelry business.
(g) War. War gives the possibility of obtaining resources elsewhere. Figure 4 shows that going to war can greatly ramp up GDP. It is a way of putting laid-off workers back to work. It is an age-old solution to not-enough-resources-to-go-around.
[8] Can any political approach put off the bad impacts suggested in Section [7] above?
A country that can provide complete supply chains based on its own resources, completely within its own borders can be somewhat insulated from these problems, as long as its resources are adequate for its population. I don’t think that any of the Advanced Countries (members of the OECD, which is similar to the US and its allies) can do that today. The US is closer to this ideal than Europe, but it is still a long way away. The central and southern part of the US, which is where Donald Trump’s support is strong, is closer to this ideal than elsewhere.
Trump is advocating adding tariffs on imported goods. Such tariffs would work in the direction of independence from China, India, and other industrialized nations. Trump also seems to advocate staying out of wars, wherever possible. If an area is doing well in terms of energy supply (including food supply), this would be a good strategy.
Kamala Harris is advocating capping today’s food prices. This would please city-dwellers, but it would encourage farmers to quit farming. Capping today’s food prices would also discourage the importation of food from elsewhere, leaving many empty shelves in grocery stores. Indirectly, it would also have an adverse impact on the world’s oil production and the quantity of food grown elsewhere.
Giving more money to poor people would almost certainly lead to more government debt. If countries in Europe were to do this, it would almost certainly devalue their currencies. They would find it harder to import goods from anywhere else in the world.
In fact, the US would likely also encounter difficulty in importing as many goods from elsewhere, if it chooses to give more money to poor people (and fund this generosity through more debt). China and Russia would have even more motivation to abandon the US dollar for trading purposes than they do today. The US, Europe, and other Advanced Economies would increasingly find imported goods unavailable.
Wind, solar, and electric vehicles are not fixing the economy now. Adding more debt to subsidize these efforts would likely have the same bad effects as adding more debt to subsidize poor people.
[9] A guess as to what could be ahead for the US, Canada, and Europe.
Donald Trump is suggesting tariffs and other policies that might be helpful for the parts of the US, Canada, and Mexico that think they might have enough resources to more or less get along on their own in the near future. This includes much of the central and southern part of the US. Central Canada would fit into this pattern, as well. Mexico is connected by pipeline to this area, too. At least in the US, Trump is favored in these areas.
In the highly populated areas along both US coasts, the debt-based policies of Kamala Harris will seem more reasonable because these sections have limited resources to rely on, but lots of population. The only solution they can imagine is more debt. I expect that Europe and the coasts of Canada will follow Kamala Harris’s strategies, but with their own leaders.
I can imagine a scenario in which after the US election, the US will break apart into two sections: a Trump section in the center of the US, and a Harris portion consisting mostly of the two coasts, and perhaps a few northern states. The Trump section will band together with Central Canada and Mexico and try to keep operating for some years longer. The Harris portion will join together with the coasts of Canada and most of Europe to get into war with Russia and China. The Harris portion will issue lots more debt. The Harris group will forget that their areas cannot really make many armaments without a huge amount of international trade. As a result, the Harris group will have great difficulty in being successful at war.
As the saying goes: “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote, decide everything”.
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2024/08/27/the-theft-is-so-blatant-and-there-is-no-shame/
Link says,
“In Atlanta, Atty General Garland will headline press conference demanding removal of 3 rule of law election board members. Their offenses? Requiring local election boards in GA to count the votes
accurately: #voters=#ballots=#votes.
Can’t have that can we, cheating Dems?”
I live in the Atlanta area. The area definitely has a mixture of races, with the city of Atlanta having relatively more Blacks and poor people than the suburbs.
https://www.ajc.com/politics/politics-blog/the-jolt-for-the-first-time-metro-atlanta-is-now-majority-nonwhite/VRYNX467VBHQBAPLUDDMK4RK5U/
The Jolt: For the first time, Metro Atlanta is now majority-nonwhite
Cobb County, where I live, is a close in suburban county. It is reported to be 49.6% white, and 50.4% other races. How districts are defined becomes very contentious because depending on how lines are drawn, there can be more people elected that are of a particular party or race.
My wife and I took a plane from Birmingham Al to Chicago last summer.
A black man with afro and a BLM shirt sat behind me next to another black fellow who was an aerospace engineer. The BLM guy was all over how he and other blacks were going to vote for Trump, how Trump was now persecuted by the same system imprisoning them. Man he was all over it…how evil the Dems were, Trump is now part of the hood….
When the press says Trump may get 20% of the black vote, I do wonder if it will be higher.
I also have doubts about “suburban women” all for the big K. Last I checked suburban women did most of the grocery buying in families. Anybody with half a brain sees the inflation the Dems have blessed us with. I have to believe Trump will get many of their votes.
This post is color blind. Just passing on a comment about how the BLM guy was ripping the Dems to shreds. Man I heard all about it last summer, before anybody in the press started saying it. It is real
I expect eventually everywhere, elderly will be left behind. This is the story in Cuba.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/its-nightmare-every-direction-communist-cuba-elderly-left-struggle-10-pensions
“It’s A Nightmare In Every Direction”: In Communist Cuba, Elderly Left To Struggle On $10 Pensions
If there is not enough to go around, the people who aren’t contributing to the workforce have to be left out.
At long last, Zuckberg admits that Biden-Harris pressured Facebook to censor content about Covid:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/stunning-letter-congress-zuckerberg-admits-biden-harris-pressured-facebook-censor-content
(UK HEALTH MINESTRY)
“UK. Nurses can refuse to treat racist patients, says Streeting.”
There will be no external judgment, they will be themselves in charge of decide who to treat or not.
https://www.nursingtimes.net/news/policies-and-guidance/nurses-can-refuse-to-treat-racist-patients-says-streeting-07-08-2024/
The background is this:
“The UK health and social care secretary has said he was “appalled” by recent attacks on Filipino nurses during far-right riots and added that clinicians could – and should – turn away abusive patients.”
Nurses working during riots have are in a situation where they themselves could be harmed.
“According to reports by the Mirror, two Filipino nurses in Sunderland were travelling to work on Friday evening when their taxis were targeted with rocks and missiles.”
It is hard to know how much harm health care workers will want to expose themselves to, to try to help others.
“It is hard to know how much harm health care workers will want to expose themselves to, to try to help others.”
No kidding. The worst is the government threatening doctors re abortion. At least they don’t do that in the UK.
You mean forcing them to perform it?
“You mean forcing them to perform it?”
I presume this is joking, though on an international list you can never be sure. If you were not say so and I can go into the gruesome details about some states in the US.
Please do that, Keith. I have no idea what you are implying or what your stance on abortion is.
Warning! This is not for the weak-stomached.
https://x.com/BillboardChris/status/1828422912002646371
What the US is missing JOY and FREEDOM. Funny this is the tag line of Harris. The dems are projection all the time.
What is Trumps tag line? Serious question.
Make America Great… Ummm.. This Time….Maybe
“What the US is missing JOY and FREEDOM. Funny this is the tag line of Harris. The dems are projection all the time.”
Objectively, things are OK or looking up. A positive outlook makes it much less likely to have social disruptions or wars.
“What is Trumps tag line? Serious question.”
In spite of the facts, there are part of this country, regardless of reality, where people fear the future will not be better or even as good as it is now.
This grim outlook is the root cause of xenophobic memes, i.e., the kind that binds Trump’s supporters together.
i don’t know what you’re smoking but i must get some.
If you listen to RFK jnr speech at the recent rally you will hear with your own ears that Trump supporters are cheering for environmentalism – cleaning up the water and food, going after the corporations, going after pharma, the regulating agencies, ending the neocons grip, ending the censorship.
im not american but not since JFK have we heard this kind of talk.
Trump, Musk, Bobby, Tulsi – say what you will but theyre all about free speech. How far they can get remains to be seen.
Having been turned into a refugee and jailed over free speech issues, I appreciate the issue.
However, Trump is fairly open about destroying the EPA.
This is all true, BUT, TrumpMuskBobbyTulsi are all border collies, too. We’ve been steered in their direction in an even less ‘organic’ way than occurred four years ago.
The grim outlook for self-employed contractors is the result of a game of musical chairs from having to compete with an increasing number of crews using low-paid, immigrant labor. Gaslighting and “othering” rural, poor and working class Americans by supporting lax immigration policies while using tax dollars to encourage the same doesn’t sit well with most people including blacks and asians. When people realize the local safety net budget for heating, utility and rent subsidies is going to illegals rather than low-income and senior citizens the chickens will come home to roost. When citizens have to cope with increasing property taxes and cost of essentials it is a recipe for change we can believe in. The hope will come after nature forces a harsh reality test on low-EROI, high BS tech schemes and grifts. Fortunately there are limits to growth and in the end most of the promises of salvation through tech progress will fail to materialize and this favors the farmers, skilled laborers, immigrants and other working class folks. By now most people are hopefully wising up to the divide and conquer tactics but unfortunately the choice is between the lesser of two evils, pick the troll or the gaslighter.. whatever floats your boat. People of good character should push for common sense immigration and economic reform but realistically the energy, debt and complexity time bomb will put everyone on an equal playing field. Replacement theory in clown world is intended to agitate the “native population” and legacy institutions but in reality the lap top class and PMCs are going to be irrelevant in a subsistence-based, de-growth economy. Quiet eye rolling and laughing are micro aggressions but it will be a common occurrence when all these entitled progressives have to eat crow and ask the deplorables how to use a broom and shovel correctly.
the sort of nuanced response i might once have written had i the wherewithal..
i’d differ on the troll vs gaslighter analogy though..
while Trump has very obvious personality defects (narcissism) and has zero training in politspeak one gets the sense there is a genuine ‘care’. Bobby and Tulsi also seem to have a certain integrity and probably would not throw their weight behind him if they didnt sense the same. (of course they may all be clueless about our energy predicament).
The dems on the other hand are literally the face of evil – the party of war, corruption, censorship.
fascinating point of view
that trump ”cares”—unless you are being ironic diarm—hard to tell sometimes.
sexual predators care only about themselves–he has admitted as much, that he is a predator.
before taking office in 16, he had to settle a 25m lawsuit for fraud–so much for caring about ”little people”
his ex wife had to be bought off with a llllllot of money to keep silent about things…which we can only guess at the horror of.
this isnt my opinion—its all on record.—plus lots more
it genuinely concerns me that millions will vote for him
you do realise that cnn, msnbc and abc are the PR arm of the democrats/blob?
im not holding the man up as a saviour but i would not conflate personal failings with public policy.
the fact that bobby kennedy is endorsing him is historic.
as i said—and stand by
a sexual predator is concerned only with self
that is his personality writ large
a willingness to defraud people confirms it—both are proven.—they are not opinions.
Bobby is an infinitely worse womanizer than Trump. He’s like the Operation Warp Speed of womanizing and would fill diaries of how he racked up several encounters per day. He essentially killed his wife over this, driving her to suicide.
He sounds like someone who should have a soul, but doesn’t. He mega-pimps for Israel, who murdered his dad and uncle. He knows what side his bread is buttered on, is the best thing you can say about him.
He wrote the limited-hangout Fauci book, which I appreciated at the time, but then ‘had to’ come out with the Wuhan book which reinforces the same Deep State narrative of Very Scary gain-of-function bioweapons.
These people are ALL compromised, ALL puppets airing some version or another of an essentially inorganic narrative. Punch vs. Judy.. the same guy has his arm up the ass of each.
Takes one to know one, Norman. 😉
Not being one myself, I really couldn’t say.
we will give them no toilet paper as punishment.
The thing which amazes me is the low income strata people supporting the party which has little interest in their fate. Power of propaganda I guess.
I would worry more, but AI and other aspects of the run up to the singularity are going to shift things far more than anyone can imagine. One example is serious life extension.
Life extension?
I assume you are joking, if you live in the land of ‘ultra-processed food’.
A UK doctor, Chris van Tulleken wrote an interesting book in 2023, ‘Ultra-Processed People’. It’s good in parts, especially his details of the past 100 yrs nutritional research. Worth buying 2nd hand, at least.
“Life extension?
I assume you are joking, if you live in the land of ‘ultra-processed food’. ”
Not joking at all. See my Wikipedia page.
Times are changing.
“The grim outlook for self-employed contractors is the result of a game of musical chairs from having to compete with an increasing number of crews using low-paid, immigrant labor. ”
It is my understanding that you just can’t get native Americans to go into construction. Someone I know says the roofing crews are all immigrants.
“but it will be a common occurrence when all these entitled progressives have to eat crow and ask the deplorables how to use a broom and shovel correctly.”
That’s one way the future could play out. The other is that technology continues to advance and we mostly have robots doing such jobs.
When they built the Manhattan skyscrapers in the early- to -mid-20th century, there were a lot of native Americans working on the girders. They had a much better head for heights than the whites, apparently.
Sorry, I meant people born here recently, not the original inhabitants.
I am rather familiar with Mohawk iron workers. Used them as characters in an SF story about a space elevator before it became clear that such were unlikely.
Here is a chunk.
^^^^^^
On the cavernous hangar deck of the former aircraft carrier Enterprise
Amid a maze of electrical cables, water, and sewer pipes, there were a hundred lashed-down house trailers. Mohawk-ironworker families from Ontario and upstate New York occupied most of them. Marc Leaf, his wife Minny, and their children lived in an outside trailer on the port side.
The Enterprise was anchored eleven miles south of Baker Island, in the Western Pacific doldrums. It was just inside the only territorial waters of the US that came within a few miles of the equator. The location made the UpLift suits happy though Marc could not imagine why. Nobody was going to attack the huge ship halfway between Hawaii and Australia. In Marc’s opinion, the monotonous weather—no storms—was the reason.
The kids were in bed and Marc and Minny were at the rail holding hands and looking out at the equatorial ocean in bright moonlight. No matter how bright, moonlight scenes are black and white. Marc thought back to a silent hike he had made when a teenager in a light snowstorm under a full moon.
It had been just below freezing in the middle of the night. Marc, his brother, his father, his uncle, a cousin, and his grandfather had walked several miles up Willow Creek. The cloud cover was thin; the full moon was bright on the fresh snow. The moonlight left pockets of pitch-black under trees and in the water. The effect was surreal, the beauty intense.
Dressed in warm boots and a military surplus jacket Marc had had no problem staying warm. There was no problem staying warm *here*. The only thing that kept it from being unbearably hot was a constant breeze from the east. The breeze blew through the hangar deck and carried away the heat from trailers’ purring air conditioners.
Over the air conditioners, Marc felt the vibration of the 31-foot diameter driver wheels turning at 900 rpm. The whip-cracking sound of the supersonic space elevator cable reminded Marc of a flag flapping in a strong wind. There was vibration from an occasional run down and run up of the variable speed cable. The elevator was lifting parts now. Over its life, more than ninety percent of the capacity of the elevator had raised more cable and counterweight. Four more doublings would take it from its current capacity of 125 tons a day to its design capacity of 2,000 tons per day.
Baker Island was nearly invisible on the horizon but they could see the airstrip beacon. Practically everything going up the elevator except new cable came in by air. Helicopters shuttled loads over to the flight deck. New cable came in converted tanker ships. Between the Enterprise and the island, UpLift was installing pylons in the shallow water for a 6-km rectenna. This was for the first small-scale, solar-power-satellite power coming online in two months. At that point, the power available to run the elevator motors would go up to a full gigawatt. All the Enterprise’s eight reactors could provide was a fifth of a GW.
Four generations of Marc’s family had been “skywalkers” on high steel in New York City, Chicago, and Pittsburgh. Marc’s grandfather and great-grandfather made an 8-hour commute from Akwesasne twice a week. Marc’s father had moved his family to the Mohawk enclave in New York. Commute accidents in those days killed more than those falling from high steel. Marc lived at one end of this job site and still faced a 22-hour commute to get to work.
“Going to miss you, Warrior,” Minny said.
“Onkwehonwehnéha.” By force of habit when he used Mohawk phrases, Marc repeated in English: “It’s always been our way.”
They stood at the rail looking out to the north. Men hunting or working far from home had been the way for the matrimonial tribe far back in history. In practical terms, the clan’s women had more influence than the often-away men did. When women in the wider western culture became “liberated,” they were just catching up with the “People of the Flint.”
After a while, Marc groused, “This has got to be the worst commute in history.”
^^^^^
If by some chance you want to read the rest: https://htyp.org/UpLift
excellent writing style hk
but i still wait to be convinced of what their purpose was for getting ”up there”
i must read the rest of it
It is hard to come up with a tag line for Trump. Perhaps, “We have been lied to for too long.”
No one can say, “Government’s role needs to become smaller,” but that is the truth of the situation.
A few years back, when Trump was running for the presidency, you called him “a nut job”, Gail. Remember?
Trump is war-lite so the military-industrial complex doesn’t like him. However, he is very pro-zy Onist and will always support Izhrail to the hilt.
That everyone is trained to come up with funny spellings to bypass automated censorship is a good indicator of where we are as a country.
My comment hasn’t appeared and I didn’t mention them once(I did mention the crime). Must be some other authority dictated social faux pas on my part.
War light, but genocide heavy?
Mass murder of defenceless children is preferred to fighting trained men with weapons and that somehow makes him righteous(he even said he’d deport anyone protesting to stop the genocide). Strange way of thinking in the west nowadays. Murderous cowards used to be the polite term for that.
Of course either will give us war and genocide. They will do the owner’s bidding, as their role dictates. Expect lots more war, genocide and the continued sabotage of the west’s energy supplies, by the owners(no one is going ‘green’ willingly are they?), to fulfill the goals of the owners agenda. We’re being led down well trodden bloody paths that we promised ourselves never to revisit, but here we are yet again, as everyone is indoctrinated never to question the cause, the system. The puppet at the front of shop does not make the decisions, only offers a different path to the same predetermined destination. The path is the vote, never the destination.
“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”
The system cares not and will sustain itself at all costs. The cost is soon coming home, but not the blame, as the entrances to those paths are reopened for another round of wholesale slaughter, for the good of the system©. They will undoubtedly call it progress and the decimated western masses will nod along and blame anything and everything but the very system that had no other end.
Monkey see, monkey do, is probably the best epitaph we can hope for for, so choose your monkey and vote for the system 😀
Lemmings don’t really commit mass suicide by jumping off cliffs. But they do often drown during mass migrations when there numbers get too high for the local environment to support. And that can look to outsiders like committing mass suicide.
Humans… Well, we are facing a fair bit of turbulence these days on our glorious journey towards Type 2 Civilization. Passengers are asked to remain in their seats, tighten their seatbelts, and keep calm.
MIGA.
Make India Great Again?
This is interesting because “they” (TPTB) have been chattering about the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, of which there were once 17 (an interesting number).
Recently there’s been talk of a Goal Eighteen (or Goal Zero).
Can you guess what it is?
Joy!
https://unfoundation.org/event/provoke-joy-sdg-0-ultimate-goal-of-agenda-2030/
They are poised to PROVOKE joy (not ‘express’ or ‘elicit’ or anything else normal, but ‘provoke’).
That’s what at the heart of all their machinations, my darlings!
This tag line of hers is particularly interesting since “They” (TPTB) have been talking for years about the 17 SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals), as we know.
But, it turns out, there’s an Eighteenth (or Zeroth) Goal.
Do you know what that is?
JOY!!!!!
https://unfoundation.org/event/provoke-joy-sdg-0-ultimate-goal-of-agenda-2030/
We are not supposed to find or encourage or elicit joy, but to PROVOKE it.
PROVOKE JOY.
Doesn’t that sound charming?
Not at all psychopathic.
Yet somehow the shooting never starts.
It’s like joy is just sitting there, minding joy’s business, being joy and you are so jealous that you must disturb joy. Antagonize joy. Molest joy to such an extent that joy reacts uncharacteristically and punches you so you cry, “punching down foul!” And alert the Eh, Deal or the Espy Elsie.
As sad new Zealand disintegrates under its woke burden energy is running out.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/government-tries-to-legislate-its-way-out-of-energy-crisis-labour-says-problem-is-dividends/23JOWYLX7BHGZIW7KCGI2RPE2M/
Brother fights brother in the streets for food and money. Childless cat ladies run the government as they chow down on pavlova.
All is lost.
Regarding LNG, your link says:
” the Government would use Parliament to legislate consents for a new LNG import terminal. ”
This will take a while, and the LNG terminal will be fairly expensive to build. The LNG, if it is available, will be high priced. I presume the LNG will be used to make electricity, and perhaps balance the intermittent wind and solar that is available.
Regarding Oil and Gas
“Luxon also reiterated the Government’s pledge to reverse the offshore oil and gas exploration ban allowing firms to eventually get new exploration permits for offshore oil and gas.”
This will take a while. Also, maybe there really isn’t oil and gas nearby. Oil companies would likely have been saying more, if good supplies seemed to be available.
Regarding electricity
The government seems to own 51% of companies that buy and sell electricity in NZ (“gentailers”). I found a different article that complains about the high profits that they are making, and the dividends that are going back to investors.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/525629/electricity-authority-puts-spotlight-on-power-profits
Of course, the government is a very major investor.
If more investment in wind is made, the ability to pay dividends will go away, and the NZ government will be worse off financially than it is now. There is a comment in Wet My Beak’s link saying:
Offshore wind is terribly expensive to build and operate. Citizens likely cannot afford it, especially if it is balanced with very expensive imported LNG.
🙂 So well put
Things just aren’t as they seem, or maybe they just aren’t accurately being reported or even outright censored.
Kevin Walmsley at his YouTube site: Inside China Business, constantly gives a macro view of how China is vertically and horizontally integrating its supply chains and manufacturing to overtake the West. While this is indeed happening, China’s Achilles heels are its increasing dependence on outside raw materials and energy. As the biblical story goes but is not stressed, one is unaware of his Achilles heel until the poison arrow hits it.
What is lurking in China is the increasing number of unemployed youth, and now maybe even mid career workers. Admittedly, some/many are without skill sets who left the rural areas for the cities in search of work, but many are college degreed kids, millions, who are in debt and can’t find jobs. Add to that the destruction of their families savings sending them to college, and from the real estate bubble bursting. Many middle age white collar workers are now losing their jobs. Coming soon to the US?
I wonder if this could explain the increase in Chinese migrants arriving across the fourth western US gateway via California (in addition to the traditional three routes through the Darien Gap in Panama and from there, dispersing through Texas, New Mexico and Arizona by the non-Chinese. )
Are these Chinese males actually underground militants, as some claim, who are being seeded into the US by the CCP, or are they actually bona fide economic migrants?
I noticed from these videos that increasingly, young Chinese men are foregoing college and applying for police academy, i.e. the few government jobs which offer more perceived security and benefits compared to the private sector, as even now, the CCP has had to cut back in the non-productive government sector -even doctors.
This competition has resulted in higher standards required for admission to these police academies that had once been considered lower class jobs.
Interestingly, this is the opposite of the “Defund the Police” movements which would theoretically increase the risk, i.e., lower the threshold, for civil unrest here in the US.
Having said that, do swelling ranks of police applicants and a police force in China enable a vicious feedback loop of even more control over the population because there are more “goons” to do the CCP’s bidding – the police and military being the last ones who will keep their jobs- aside from all the sweatshop workers who work the “9-9-6” jobs ( go to work from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM 6 days a week) doing the productive work for the equivalent of a few dollars a day?
As long as it has enough well-paid enforcers, a tyrannical government can keep itself in power. When the money runs out, or when the money becomes worthless and no longer buys anything, the upheaval occurs.
But the 2nd amendment in the US adds a whole new dimension to this quagmire. Will police in the US risk being shot? This theoretically won’t become such an acute problem in China, or maybe even in England, NZ, Australia, or Canada as those citizens have been effectively disarmed. Or is it that males in the US, despite being supposedly armed, are so comfortable, spoiled, and lazy that they won’t get off their couches anyway?
The rise in police careers starts in after @ 10:50
Also just out:
This looks really disturbing. Huge problems in China will be exported around the world!
Export. Ironic. You’re a real masterpiece Gail.
100k face job loss? Wow. Country of 1.4B. Meanwhile, they produce $10k electric vehicles that force us (USA and Canada) to put 100% tariffs on these cars to protect our uncompetitive industry. China is a modern version of 1950’s USA: productive and industrialized. The past 50 years, SQUANDERED.
But sure, just import a bunch of people with no skills, become youtubers, financialize everything, import everything, piss off everyone globally … and then pretend it’s “Chyna” in dire straits.
But.. but…AI !!!
you said : “Are these Chinese males actually underground militants, as some claim, who are being seeded into the US by the CCP, or are they actually bona fide economic migrants?”
I noticed that in France many young Chinese men are enrolling at university and seem to be present on our soil to observe and report their observations back to their home country. They are of above-average intelligence and speak French with astonishing ease as if they had received special training. I have no doubt that the situation is similar in other European countries.
I do enjoy how the young Chinese men at the US border stand at attention.
Yes, I saw this in Vermont at the Vermont Law School (school focus is environmental law). Group of three, so less likely that two might collude against the Chinese state. They’d attend our “Building a Local Economy” presentations but did not participate, or even mingle socially. They strictly observed.
The cancer is spreading from CRE to the personal housing market .
https://wolfstreet.com/2024/08/23/inventory-of-new-completed-houses-surges-to-highest-since-2009-triple-from-2-years-ago-exactly-whats-needed-to-bring-down-prices-across-the-housing-market/
Builders have started making smaller homes to keep the prices down. For couples whose children have left home, this is often exactly what people want–they want to downsize, and get rid of some yard work. The article indicated that the builders “buy down” the interest rate, I presume for some set time period. This helps bring monthly payments down. It is no surprise that these homes are popular.
I can see competition from new homes might pierce the high prices of the used homes.
Small homes? That’d be progress. In the UK the average home in the dwelling stock is probably about 90 m2 (around 1,000 ft2). I doubt if a new home is much larger than 80 m2 (850-900 ft2).
If you want to grow a lot of your own food, though, it could be beneficial to have a garden of 1,000 m2 (quarter acre) or even more.
Creatine as the actual supplement with real impact
https://youtu.be/2N1ezrkSgR0?si=RfZPeDRpogBneiBL
This fellow is talking about taking high doses of creatine. I heard him mention 10 grams a day. When I look up information about creatine side effects, this is one of the sites I found:
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/creatine-safety-and-side-effects
It talks about a dose of 5 mg per day causing increased water retention, and because of this, weight gain. But this site claims it is safe.
I do not eat much meat. I have tended to stay away from creatine. I don’t think I have the symptoms he mentions.
I find it hard to believe that it has beneficial effects on the brain, if most of the brain creatine is made by the brain itself, as claimed by this doctor. Are there commenters who have found the supplement helpful for Anxiety and Depression?
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Latest from Jean Laherrere on Middle East oil production . French , use google translate . Total production (9 countries) peaked in 2016 at 26.6 million b/d.
https://aspofrance.org/2024/08/23/middle-east-crude-oil-production-forecast/
He fits curves to begin dropping immediately from now onwards, when they haven’t begun to do so yet. It’s goal-seeking in the extreme, even though it will probably turn out roughly correct because of reserve depletion, but my point is that most of his curve fits/trends are nonsensical on the data he’s using.
Copy/paste from the comments section from Mike Shellman’s blog .
” Laherrere’s article was also posted at Quark’s site . Some comments of interest by Quark .
1.Laherrere is not just any oil analyst. He worked for 37 years at TOTAL and in 1991 he devoted himself mainly to studying the exploration and production of conventional oil, until in 1998 he published the first modern analysis, together with Colin Campbell, “the end of cheap oil”.
Like everyone else, he underestimated the impact of shale oil, but he is a leading authority in the world of conventional oil.
Of course, his forecast should be taken as an important reference, but not as an absolute certainty. In fact, I maintain my roadmap and with the projects in development, I do not believe that conventional oil will begin a serious decline until around 2030.
What is striking about the report is that Laherrere thinks that OPEC’s cuts are not voluntary, but driven by exhaustion. And he establishes a much more aggressive forecast than the previous one from 2018, in direct contrast to the IEA’s forecasts.
I still think that oil producers will maintain supply at all costs, even assuming a very rapid depletion of reserves, which will prolong the start of the abrupt decline for a few more years. Then geology will dictate the verdict…
Comment 2
I think Theoildrum’s analysis was not so far off. It did not take into account the desperate attempt to maintain production at the cost of depleting reserves, thus minimizing the expected decline. The bell-shaped Gaussian curve that Hubbert observed has turned into a Seneca cliff. Although we are still on the long plateau, we know that the decline will be rapid and it will not matter much whether it starts in 2025 or 2030 .
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hole in head
HIH,
Having looked at the report and graphs, to the extent that I could, I was more than a bit concerned. The general public, and sometimes oil folks, look at ME supply as a zero decline rate constant.
There are many questions beyond the scope of his notes and this blog which come up. Of real import is the effect on data points of supply disruptions and/or manipulations by SA, Iran and Iraq. Embedded in some of those are the under exploration and deterioration of production and equipment for lack of foreign inputs for political reasons. These all add to noise in the graphs that draws the curve fit to the critical side. In no way am I qualified to speak on the subject but I can wonder. At any rate, declines comes but when and how drastic?
Some time ago, I noted here that the LTO phenomenon actually aggravated the slope of the supply falloff because it masked the global conventional decline. Once the LTO peters out to a larger extent, in the PB for example, we will see that the emperor is wearing no clothes. It did not have to be this way and Mike laid that bare today.
Again, it is so negligent it almost looks like a plan to me.
“What is striking about the report is that Laherrere thinks that OPEC’s cuts are not voluntary, but driven by exhaustion.”
I agree. OPEC’s cuts are driven by exhaustion. One thing we don’t often look at is the countries that drop out of OPEC. They drop out because of falling production. This makes the situation even worse.
The problems today in Libya are an example of what happens with exhaustion. Production stops because of internal squabbles. People assume prices will rise, but that is not what happens. What happens is
1. Growing wage and wealth disparity
2. More internal fighting
3. Higher costs of production, but not higher sales prices to match those higher costs of production.
4. Few leftover funds for starting new wells in areas that have not been drilled.
Gail , you missed this .
” The bell-shaped Gaussian curve that Hubbert observed has turned into a Seneca cliff. ” .
I probably missed it, you are right. I should look at it more closely.
Jean LaHerrere says something like “The OPEC countries are likely pumping at full capacity as they need the money from their declining production. I agree.
Which fits in perfectly with the 2025 prediction for end of oil that I have continually posted in the past
This is related to a post I made yesterday.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2024/08/21/todays-economy-is-like-that-of-the-late-1920s/comment-page-2/#comment-466210
I said, “The 2024 Statistical Review of World Energy shows that peak oil production for OPEC occurred in 2016 at 37.4 million barrels per day. In 2023, it was down to 34.0 million barrels per day.”
OPEC+ keeps saying the price is too low, and because of this, they are cutting production. This is what peak oil really looks like. It looks like an awfully lot of poor citizen who cannot afford to buy goods and services made with crude oil. As a result, crude oil price does not rise high enough for producers. They voluntarily cut production.
We just heard about Libya cutting production because of internal conflict with respect to the banking sector. Internal conflict is another reason for cutting production.
Ravi, there’s the fog of fiat, there also is the fog of ‘proven reserves’. Very, VERY closely connected. Do not sit in the chair, the helicopter tells you more. Real reserve data makes zombies, and the worlds currencies cannot cope with that.
Fiat currency supported by Fiat reserves . $ 350 trillion global debt is supported by this s***.
https://d31dn7nfpuwjnm.cloudfront.net/images/valoraciones/0061/7827/GOaJxKNWIAAPzWO.jpeg?1716630897
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An article from Doximity, a publication for physicians. Doximity paid STAT for rights to post this article from STAT about yet another tentacle of the vast tentacle squid of humanity, i.e. the the banking system, of financialization of everything including food, energy, housing, farmland etc. Doximity posted an article last month how private equity is now buying up, (or has already bought up?) all the anesthesiology practices from the Texas hospitals, who, in turn had previously bought up anesthesiologists practices across the state. The vast amounts of toxic fiat currency created by the FED have enabled an ever increasing insidious control of more and more assets. No one wants to do productive value added work any more. It’s all about financialization for purposes of total control.
https://www.statnews.com/2024/08/19/private-equity-health-cares-vampire/
Private equity: health care’s vampire
Purchases of hospitals, nursing homes, and physician practices by private equity firms are harming health care.
By Steffie Woolhandler, David U. Himmelstein, Elizabeth Schrier, and Hope Schwartz Aug. 19, 2024
Woolhandler and Himmelstein are professors at the City University of New York’s Hunter College and lecturers in medicine at Harvard Medical School; Schrier and Schwartz are medical residents at the University of California San Francisco, and Highland Hospital in Oakland, California, respectively.
Private equity firms are sucking the resources out of America’s hospitals and nursing homes, and feeding on doctors to generate profits. These firms — which pool funds from wealthy investors and are exempt from many of the regulations and disclosure requirements that apply to other types of investments — have spent a half-trillion dollars since 2018 buying up medical resources.
Using dollops of investors’ cash and massive loans, private equity firms have taken over hundreds of hospitals, thousands of nursing homes, and tens of thousands of medical practices, leaving the hospitals, nursing homes, and practices — not the investors — on the hook to pay off the debt.
Private equity owners often compound that financial injury by selling off the hospitals’ land and buildings, handing the proceeds to investors and saddling the hospitals with unaffordable rents for facilities they once owned. Take the 33-hospital Steward system, which originated from the private equity purchase of a Catholic hospital chain in Massachusetts in 2010 by Cerberus Capital Management. When Steward sold its properties to a trust and then leased them back in 2016, some facilities were so cash-strapped they couldn’t afford artificial valves for heart surgeries, supplies for their ER trauma center, or repairs for broken elevators.
Steward eventually spiraled down to bankruptcy; several of its hospitals that provided vital care to nearby communities for decades look set to close. But private equity investors walked away with hundreds of millions, and Steward’s CEO still sails on his $40 million superyacht.
Steward isn’t an outlier. As we and other colleagues documented recently in JAMA, private equity firms routinely strip hospitals’ assets. Nationwide, in the two years after a private equity takeover, hospitals lost on average nearly one-quarter of their real estate, buildings, and equipment. That’s equivalent to a $28 million loss per hospital. And as others have found, after private equity takeovers of hospitals, patients experienced more falls and more bloodstream infections from their IVs, signals of deteriorating care quality.
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Private equity firms to acquire health care billing and payments firm R1 in $8.9 billion deal
These companies have followed a similar asset-stripping playbook for nursing homes. After the Carlyle group bought the Manor Care chain, leaving the nursing homes — not Carlyle — responsible for $5 billion in new debt, it extracted $6.1 billion for investors by selling off the nursing homes’ land and buildings. Under the lease-back arrangement dictated by Carlyle, the homes paid $470 million annually in rent, as well as all insurance, maintenance, and real estate taxes for their properties. Eleven years after the takeover, Manor Care declared bankruptcy, owing $7.1 billion. But, as in Steward’s case, the private equity investors walked away with healthy profits.
Nursing home takeovers harm more than finances. For Manor Care’s roughly 25,000 residents, care deteriorated as the chain struggled financially, staff were laid off, and code violations soared. In the wake of private equity nursing home purchases nationally, nurse staffing fell and resident deaths increased by 11%. Meanwhile, billings, mostly to Medicare, increased by 8%.
Since most doctors’ offices aren’t valuable as real estate, when a private equity firm buys a practice it relies on alternative profit-boosting strategies. For the private-equity-purchased emergency department staffing firms that employ tens of thousands of emergency physicians, “surprise bills” were the answer: the doctors were pulled out of insurers’ networks, which allowed the private-equity-owned companies to bill patients — even those seeking care at an “in-network” hospital — for far more than any insurer would pay.
For the 8% of dermatology practices now owned by private equity firms, profit boosts have come from ginning up follow-up visits and cosmetics sales, replacing dermatologists with lower-skilled workers, and pressing staff to perform more biopsies and unnecessary procedures. For other specialties, like gastroenterology and radiation oncology, the strategy involves cornering the market by buying up most of the practices in a city or region, which allows the firm to demand high prices from insurers and patients. When a private equity company buys a clinic or a doctor’s practice, their prices increase by 20% and the number of visits also rises sharply.
While mythological vampires have supernatural powers to control their victims’ minds, private equity firms use more mundane methods: doctors who resist their owners’ profit-driven modus operandi lose their jobs, and the ubiquitous non-compete clauses they often sign mean they have to move outside of the region to continue practicing medicine.
Like vampires, private equity investors in medicine despise the light: At least for now, they can keep secret their purchases and financial information (for a decade, Steward outright refused Massachusetts’ demands for that), as well as staffing and service changes such as closing obstetrical units.
The well-established harms of private takeovers of hospitals, nursing homes, and physicians’ practices call for strong action. Although 33 states ban corporations from practicing medicine, loopholes allow private equity firms to use financial levers to effectively control physicians. An outright ban on private equity ownership of doctors’ practices is the only surefire way to assure that these companies aren’t pulling medical strings. A similar ban should apply to hospitals and nursing homes, most of which were built with taxpayer dollars channeled through grants, tax exemptions, and capital payments that are folded into Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements. Mandating that private equity owners disclose their purchases, financial information, and service changes is also needed.
Communities, not investors, should control essential health resources.
Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., M.P.H., and David U. Himmelstein, M.D., are Distinguished Professors at the City University of New York’s Hunter College and lecturers in medicine at Harvard Medical School. Elizabeth Schrier, M.D., is an internal medicine resident at the University of California San Francisco. Hope Schwartz, M.D., is an emergency medicine resident at Highland Hospital in Oakland, California.
you are quite right
the same is happening to veterinary care in uk
the same thing is happening to veterinary care in uk
its called ”turning the planet into cash”
Actually, it’s called maximizing economic activity so you can keep your in-group employed. People who are employed, people who are earning income are more likely to stay alive and keep other people alive.
It’s not just about employment, it’s also about stimulating demand enough to keep commodity prices high enough for producers to make a profit. To stimulate demand , our wise leaders thought it would be important to encourage people to be very ambitious and individualistic and aim for a career.
The public has been subject to lots of propaganda about how grim the future is for people who ONLY have a high school diploma or work with their hands. Everyone reading this, except for kulmthestatusquo, accepts the paradigm that everyone deserves a fair shot at a “career”, a well-paying job. Consequently, now, we have millions if not billions of people willing to perform any task in exchange for above subsistence lifestyle.
i always set my common denominators as low as possible
our current level of existence requires us to create money in order to buy and sell bits of the planet
“important to encourage people to be very ambitious and individualistic”
It’s *much* worse.
Over the long run up to the Industrial Revolution, Clark showed that people were genetically selected for these traits. Those with the traits had twice as many surviving children as those without.
Wrong. Those people were ambitious but within the context of providing for their families.
So, they were not individualistic at all.Individualism is relatively a recent phenomenon that can be traced to a few pundits who were influential in the 20th century.
“Those people were ambitious but within the context of providing for their families.”
Providing my have been a side effect of having wealth.
“So, they were not individualistic at all.”
They were shopkeepers, landlords, small manufacturing operators, and farmers. Whatever they were it was not communal.
“Individualism is relatively a recent phenomenon that can be traced to a few pundits who were influential in the 20th century.”
What is the opposite of individualism?
Private equity does a lot of harm:
Besides making a monopoly on anesthesiologists in Texas.
Private equity has done a lot of harm, elsewhere, as well.
Fianancialization has gotten out of control. The big keep getting bigger, squeezing out human beings.
Investor-owned mobile home parks are pricing out residents: ‘It’s borderline criminal.’
New Hampshire Public Radio | By Michaela Towfighi – Concord Monitor Published August 13, 2024 at 1:58 PM EDT
https://www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2024-08-13/investor-owned-mobile-home-parks-are-pricing-nh-residents-out-its-borderline-criminal
McGahey, a 74-year-old Vietnam War veteran, envisioned the over-55 community as an affordable place to retire when bought the home in May of last year for $80,000.
When he first looked at the property, the rent for the lot of land beneath the home was $528 per month. By the time his loan was approved and he moved in, it increased to $829. As of July 1, rent on the plot was up to $965, and when a prospective buyer looked into making an offer on the house, the property manager saidnew monthly fee would soon grow to over$1,000.
McGahey’s moving in with his daughter for health reasons, but if he stayed put, he’s not sure how he’d pay his bills. After an out-of-state investor, Oakshire Capital, purchased the park in 2021, rent increases soon followed.
Great Brook Village is not an anomaly in these rising prices. Across the country, investors have purchased manufactured housing parks in wide swaths. Residents can be cash cows for park owners, as they own their houses but only rent the land
With a $1,050 monthly mortgage, the rent practically doubles McGahey’s bills.
“Bottom line is I have to move, but I am caught between a rock and a hard spot,” he said. “My credit is going to be totally destroyed. It was a very hard decision to make, but I have to do what’s best for me.”
the real estate investment trust sector,” he said. “So there’s been a lot of capital flowing in that direction, unfortunately for people who live in manufactured housing parks.”
In 2021, the 5.8-acre Great Brook Village was sold to Oakshire Capital for $4.2 million. Horvath and Tremblay, an investment real estate company based out of Massachusetts, arranged the sale.
Oakshire Capital manager Bradley Pereira did not reply to email and phone requests for comment.
McGahey didn’t realize his park was investor-owned when he purchased it. Meanwhile, longtime residents watched the sale happen, hopeful that a new owner would maintain the park as was.
Bob Denutte, 70, has lived in Great Brook Village for 14 years, a few doors down from McGahey. When he moved in, rent was a little over $300, he said. New rent for prospective buyers is now $1,195.
It is the poorest people that are most easily harmed by all of these moves. They have nowhere else to go, if they are priced out of their mobile home parks. They will turn to drugs or crime.
I don’t really see this as a problem of financialization. i see this as the direct consequence of professionalization. Tasking credentialed professionalism to address any “problem”, at least in the West, usually results in costly solutions.
The average professional is obsessed with maximizing self-gain regardless of whether they are working in a for-profit sector on non-profit sector.
Regulation and credentialism does nothing to change their motivations. They will never ever do what is best for everyone. It’s a complex issue because a lot of these professionals are allowed to operate very independently within large organizations to the point they harm them.
I think we are behind the days where one leader’s greed or drive would increase the fortunes of everyone who followed his orders. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of incentives for anyone to create long-term value for an organization.
That’s part of it, but with no material increase in energy or other resources, people will naturally try to monetize things that haven’t been subject to monetization. This is why we’re getting all the noise about SDGs and so forth.
It’s a trend Charles Eisenstein pointed out a while ago, where we have taken activities that used to be free, freely given, or freely exchanged, and brought them into the monetary system (think of child-care, elder-care, etc.)
“activities that used to be free, freely given, or freely exchanged, and brought them into the monetary system ”
I suspect that this was a trend that occurred in socialist and Communist countries. The main difference would be that central planners played the role of private equity firms.
You will be able to power your Smartphone with a mini-wind turbine sitting on top of your head. Now, that’s a product I’d invest in!
even better if you could do a 4 minute mile while talking to somebody
Good point!
https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/libyas-eastern-based-government-close-all-oilfields-2024-08-26/
”Most of the Libyan crude is exported to European refineries. Italy has been the main customer for decades.
Attaqa reported a week days ago that Haftar and the head of the of the House of Representatives threatened to close ALL the oil fields to put pressure on the Presidential Council and the government of Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dabaiba. They want to retract the dismissal of the governor of Libyan Central Bank and change the way oil revenues are divided. Oil exports have been halted in the past, sometimes for an extended period. Our readers are familiar with the events that led to the closure of certain fields.
We wrote a week ago in the Daily Energy report that “The threat of losing some or all Libyan crude exports is real.”. Now the decision to clos eteh fields is made!
We focus on exports because they matter to the rest of the world, not production. Hence, what is the impact on global oil markets if all Libyan oil exports are halted? ”
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F35be316a-6501-43b8-b68d-b59815c2399b_1104x633.png
Libya is exporting about 1.0 million barrels per day, or more.
The article says,
Elsewhere it says:
The chart linked to at the end of your comment shows where the exports are currently headed. Europe seems to be a popular destination.
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/brent-prices-jump-after-oil-rich-libya-declares-force-majeure-across-all-oil-production
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‘Devastating figures on the extraordinary physical requirements of Big Wind and Big Sun.
“At best, the renewable energy sector would not only be the largest consumer of its own energy output, but encompass the bulk of the British economy.” ‘?
https://x.com/mattwridley/status/1827784962462105973
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-terrifying-scale-of-the-green-revolution/
The terrifying scale of the green revolution | The Spectator
Good comment from Vaclav Smil:
“What I see when I see a wind turbine…pure embodiment of fossil fuels.” Vaclav Smil”
My comment: EROEI calculations assume that devices use part of their own output to produce more devices. But wind turbines and solar panels are instead major users of fossil fuels. There is no way they can reproduce themselves.
Excerpts from the Spectator article:
Making these devices within the UK would take the whole economy! Hardly a productive way to operate an economy.
“It is necessarily a capital-intensive and very expensive system.”
This is exactly the same conclusion as the one of the study from Ferroni I posted earlier. The comment from Smil is very good indeed. The energy from fossil fuels invested in “renewables” seems to be an expression of the red queen syndrome. Added complexity that will just accelerate the depletion.
I don’t agree though that plants “are relatively simple organisms, and they do not move rapidly or have complex nervous systems.” They are not simple at all, but we don’t properly understand how they work.
“There was more than one site, more than one weapon”?
https://rumble.com/v56w3ql-trump-shooting-secret-service-agent-clears-the-public-before-shooting-start.html?e9s=src_v1_ucp
If you’ve watched the JFK video, (Chris Martenson posted it on his website) you can see the SS Agent who was running alongside and protecting JFK, got called back by a superior. You can watch the exasperated look on his face as to say, WTF are you kidding me? Moments later JFK, was shot.
The DOD paid $61m: 24:25 in.
https://rumble.com/v5a3yxh-an-interview-with-laura-lynn-tyler-thompson.html?e9s=src_v1_upp
Video interview of Dr. Fleming. Talking about fact that there was a law against making biological weapons. Whole lot people involved in making these things happening, including funding.
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CNG class 8 trucks for all countries with natural gas and oil wells that are getting gassy
https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/how-do-natural-gas-class-8-trucks-work
this is certainly a step in the right direction, but diesel for automotive is 7% of total consumption.
A way of converting diesel trucks to using Compressed Natural Gas. There was recently a link saying that China is starting to do this.
I would guess that trucks with this fuel system don’t have the power of diesel (can’t get the additional burst of power to carry a heavy load up a big hill, for example), but they may work well enough for some current diesel uses.
China would probably use some of this natural gas from coal mines. Or natural gas purchased from Russia.
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https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1ef7085d3f72822066a1746dce3b797930773fe6cb7a75708acb5c39d3da1980.png?w=800&h=219
US vs China electricity generation
Exactly!
There are a lot of US-China charts that look this way. In fact, Advanced Economies vs China charts tend to look this way. Adding wind and solar has done nothing for US electricity supply, nor for the electricity supply of other Advanced Countries. The price of electricity becomes too high. Also, the pricing system drives other electricity producers (especially nuclear) out of business, hurting total electricity supply.
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Here’s something about British Steel no longer importing coke and coal:
https://x.com/tomhfh/status/1826904283033329827
Further down in the thread, the company says, “We’re discussing our decarbonisation plans with the government.”
I’ve a couple of energy-related post to share. First, the future of grocery shopping: no dairy or other fresh food (no refrigeration overhead; small amt. of frozen).
https://canadiangrocer.com/loblaws-new-discount-store
My guess there will follow butcher shops for meat. Milk and milk products shops. Produce stores. If the grocery wants to become the dry goods store that is fine.
I wrote two comments, both quite harsh, and both gone . Don’t know why.
All I can say is good times are up for the 90+% of the planet earth. Only penury and extreme coercion will await them since the ‘slack’ to provide them more or less comfortable lifestyle is now gone.
I don’t think I took down any comments recently.
My understanding is that sometimes they get auto-flagged for moderation and Gail has to manually explicitly approve them before they show up.
How the Current Global Financial Crisis Leads to Biblical Tyranny (in 10 Steps) .
https://brittgillette.substack.com/p/how-the-current-global-financial
This is very good. I don’t know whether the current system will hold together to get to the point of rolling out its plans for the future:
Central Bank Digital Currency
Tokenized Assets
Digital ID’s
Then there will be the “Mark of the Beast” that everyone will be required to have, to make any transaction.
Britt Gillette makes a case that we are headed for Biblical End Times. Perhaps so. But only if the system can hold together long enough. I don’t know how many years this might take.
Gillette explains what happens earlier too.
and it is clear we have already done 5 to 7 of those steps. Which one is it going to be Davidina? mark of the beast or crimea?
Tyranny is inevitable
It is the only way to direct resources to where they are needed
That would seem to be an explanation for the work that is being done in areas such as CBDCs and Digital IDs.
Tyranny is just a bastard version of ‘tranny’. It hides behind pink hair, noserings and deep frozen penissus. Cutting some wires and burn some 5g stuff and its gone.
What happens if you end up being ruled by a tyrant who is pushing the “wrong” policies?
The trouble with tyranny is you can’t turn it off or guide or steer it. It may direct resources to places where they are wasted. It will be the tyrant, not you, who decides what to do with the resources, and you will be powerless to change their mind.
It was always been so, at least during our lifetimes. I can’t remember a time where resources were directed in the direction the public wanted.
Long read . The Enshittification of everything .
https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2024/07/15/Enshittification-Everything/
Complexity is costly but the returns on it are higher than lower levels of complexity.
This why the rising costs of movies do not concern Hollywood. That gives them permission to charge higher prices for tickets. Higher ticket prices equal higher profits. Higher profits give the impression that all is well. In reality, their profit margin may be shrinking or they may be losing customers.
For years and years, a friend of mine has been calling it “The Crappening”.
Crapi-fication has been our local word of choice.
Planned obsolescence has grown up and has legs of its own.
I had a new AC system installed for my home. It included a high tech Bluetooth system in the main control board that repeatedly failed. The poor AC repairmen replaced motor after motor, then just hardwired around the Bluetooth.
It is currently operating well but only after lots of struggle.
Everyone has stories like this.
Manufacturing of physical goods has been moving away from sustainability. That is why many people think sustainability is scam.
>> The industry that keeps planes airborne and cars on the road now depends on a platform that makes earthquakes, poisons groundwater, leaks methane, fragments agricultural land and defies regulation as arrogantly as Meta or Google. Most of us “users,” meanwhile, can’t understand why the costs of flying, driving and heating our homes are rising.
No one mentioned the arrest of Telegram’s CEO and founder? we are going to lose all ability to communicate securely.
Yes, Western Civilization is eating itself. The mask has fallen.
We all use telegram, as well as other methods for deeper security. Wechat is an option, but basically you need to be validated by someone in China, who can also validate only one new user every month. no chance that wechat can ever become telegram.
signal is better i think, as do lots of these privacy-interested reddit users:
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/19c4b87/signal_vs_telegram_in_2024/
and if you really care about privacy, PGP isn’t hard and is unbreakable, i believe.
Saw a comment today that the Ukrainian army mostly uses Signal and Russian army uses Telegram. It might say something about security and who has access to what.
that just means that signal is visible to authorities in the west, and telegram in the east.
Right, but what makes that funny is he moved to UAE supposedly to prevent Russian interference/pressure on Telegram. Maybe his anti-Russian-authorities stance and UAE move was just a ruse to deflect international suspicions.
Two things in life you do not get to choose — your parents and your motherland/ fatherland .
“He [imprisioned Russian Telegram bilionaire] Pavel Durov wanted to be a global citizen who is fine living away from his homeland. He miscalculated. The enemies we now have in common see him as a Russian and therefore unpredictable and dangerous. . . It is high time Durov understood that one can choose neither the home country nor the times one is born into,” he added.
— Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev
Dmitry Medvedev
Once, quite a long time ago, I asked Durov why he did not want to cooperate with law enforcement agencies on serious crimes. “This is my principled position,” he said. “Then there will be serious problems in any country,” I told him.
He considered that the biggest problems he had in Russia, and left, then also received citizenship / residence permit in other countries. I wanted to be a brilliant “man of the world” who lives well without a homeland. Ubi bene ibi patria!
He had miscalculated. For all our common enemies now, he is Russian – and therefore unpredictable and dangerous. Other blood. Definitely not Musk or Zuckerberg (by the way, who actively cooperates with the FBI). Durov must finally understand that the Fatherland, like the times, does not choose…
Courtesy Moon Of Alabama
Being able to freely communicate about the crimes of the Zionist state is upsetting someone.
(Article by Andrea Zhok, Phd University of Milan, published on ‘Comedonchisciotte’)
“IS THE ARREST IN FRANCE OF MR. TELEGRAM AN APPETIZER OF THE AUTHORITARIAN TURN?”
https://comedonchisciotte.org/larresto-in-francia-di-mr-telegram-e-lantipasto-di-una-svolta-autoritaria/
Easy to be translated with Deepl.com or Google Translator
The concept of “internet security” was an oxymoron. Almost from the very beginning.
Leaders…and other actors were interested in the potential for monitoring and herding human behavior on a massive scale using …”scientific management” techniques from the moment lots of human activity started taking place online.
Putting a lot of data out there can be used against users but that is precisely what modern internet infrastructure is set up to do; collect data. Old computers can’t use the internet partly because the modern internet is set up to collect lots of data on users and that data collecting uses a lot of computer resources (CPU, memory)
The fact that someone thinks that someone thinks that something gathering information about him or her is going use it in an altruistic way is behind naive. Its almost like they’re stuck in the late 1990s era of internet hype where the experts were saying it was about building a “global village” and a place of freedom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96rThQ3Lgq8
COMAC and Boeing estimate the need for more than 40,000 new airplanes by ~2040. Most of the growth will come from Asia and … Africa!
So, if everything’s going to hell, why do the Chinese invest in a commercial non-military air industry? I think they anticipate the continuation of civilization. Their party officials are smart, comprised of engineers of all stripes, and they are strategic and long-term in their moves. It might be worth asking what they know that we don’t or at least having the humility to accept that our predictions may be way off and we are not the smartest people in the room … maybe Dennis is right, everything will be fine.
Well, sometimes too much optimism is unjustified. BAU mentality can be misleading.
Take for instance the Annual Energy Outlook of 1999 which had a projection to 2020
https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc707811/
On page 46 you can find these words:
“All three price cases are similar to the price projections in AEO98 beyond 2005, reflecting considerable optimism about the potential for worldwide petroleum supply, even in the face of the substantial expected increase in demand. Production from countries outside OPEC is expected to show a steady increase, reaching almost 47 million barrels per day by the turn of the century and increasing gradually thereafter to more than 55 million barrels per day by 2020.”
“By 2000, OPEC supply in the reference case is over 30 million barrels per day, consistent with announced plans for OPEC capacity expansion.
By 2020, OPEC production is almost 59 million barrels per day (almost twice its 1997 production) in the reference case, over 51 million in the high price case, and over 71 million in the low price case.
Worldwide demand for oil varies across the price cases in response to the price paths. Total world demand for oil ranges from 124.4 million barrels per day in the low price case to 109.1 in the high price case.”
Well, that is a bad prediction underlined by too much optimism, isn’t it?
59 million barrels per day by 2020 produced by OPEC in the reference case or even 71 in the most optimistic one?
OPEC is currently well below 30 million barrels per day!
World oil production of 124 million barrels by 2020? We are around 82 since the peak of 2018…
However, by 2050 oil will still flow in big numbers, probably around 60/65 million barrels per day. What we really have to think about is what kind of lifestyle people can afford at that time.
Sure, it didn’t hit the best case projection, but it didn’t fall off either. Total liquids are still ~100mbpd. CNG trucks exist. In China, 1/2 of all new vehicles are electric and that will result in falling gasoline demand when older vehicles are retired. My point is that there may be ways of kicking the can further than we here think. Not really an argument, just a reminder to keep an open mind. We could fall apart here with greatly reduced consumption levels while China and Asia muddle along through the 2040s with a more gradual taper.
Absolutely ivanislav, we have to consider all the scenarios.
In my humble opinion I think that if the China-Russia alliance persists into the future, Russia can fuel all the energy needs of the chinese.
Europe on the other hand, will, in the medium/long run, see a decrease in energy consumption, by a combination of de-industrialization, an increase of general efficiency and an aging population.
Maybe, on a world scale, we can hope that the peak of the human population, the aging of the OECD countries and a new energy mix, will match the decline of the petroleum supply allowing us to get along and maintain some sort of basic services.
The Business as Usual will go on as long as it can of course, but the world will not go into chaos all of a sudden (maybe). Some parts of the world will do better than others, but one thing is certain: the age of cheap living is over for good in the West, there are now more “competitors” on the stage and the kind of lifestyle that the westerner have enjoyed for so many decades will be something of the past for an increasing chunk of the population.
Ivan, replacing gasoline demand is barking up the wrong tree. The world does have quite a bit of gasoline. the problem is diesel, and they can not do that.
Heavy equipment can be refitted with gasoline engines. Not ideal, but doable.
(I’m talking about redesign, not existing equipment)
“Not ideal, but doable.”
You can also make diesel by the F/T process. They make around 140,000 bbl/day in Qatar.
producing diesel by the ft process is doable–agreed keith.
but it seems to be only doable if the system is close to abundant sources of natural gas.
just as the ft process was doable in nazi germany by being adjacent to abundant coal supplies.
so the ”system” appears to exchange one energy form for another.
now………
your scientific knowledge is infinitely greater than mine, but doesnt that exchange result in net loss?
Seems to me that changing gas into diesel, is, in effect, making a battery.
And you cannot run world wide transport systems on batteries.
Natural gas is abundant in some places, but it requires a lot of energy use to ship as LNG. This limits the ability to use natural gas far away from where it is extracted. It becomes too high-cost to be used in distant locations.
i sometimes think keiths calculator has a R key
for ridiculous
Gail, how is difficulty of distribution an argument against its use? We already have gas pipes to most houses in the US. Let’s not exaggerate the problems, we have enough already! No, not everywhere has gas, but for a while, we do here in the US.
I am not sure of your question. Natural gas tends to be quite cheap in the US. It is distributed quite widely by pipeline (but not to rural areas, not enough to the US Northeast. Where LNG gets expensive is sending it overseas to Asia and Europe. A lot of US export capability is being built, whether or not we have the natural gas to export and whether or not the countries that might supposedly buy the natural gas will be able to afford purchasing it.
Retrofitting diesel fuels trucks to use gasoline (or other fuel) will make them have less power. They will likely have difficulty carrying big loads up hills or accelerating when land is flat. For light duty work, the substitution might work.
Farm equipment generally runs on diesel, so the machinery has the power to get itself out when it gets stuck in mud. I question how well it would work with gasoline.
“so the ”system” appears to exchange one energy form for another.”
Happens all the time. For example, sunlight evaporates water that then falls as rain and we make hydropower from that water.
“but doesnt that exchange result in net loss?”
Sure. So what?
“Seems to me that changing gas into diesel, is, in effect, making a battery.
“And you cannot run world wide transport systems on batteries.
Certainly you can long as you have the energy needed to charge the batteries
Straightforward engineering. You really should consider the amount of energy we have available from our star.
One example, coal, steam and solar energy makes syngas for diesel For the coal you can substitute biomass or even CO2 pulled out of the air.
The US has ‘plenty’ of diesel?
According to ‘david’:
“ . . . did you know that 17 mbpd is inputted into US refineries, about 93% capacity, max is 18.2 mbpd?
did you know that the US refinery output of diesel is about 5 mbpd, and that the US uses “only” 3.7 mbpd so the other 1.3 mbpd of diesel is exported? . . . “?
For a long time, the view was that if oil production was too low, extra oil production could come from a “call on OPEC” with their huge reserves. This was really nonsense. OPEC has what it has. Its pipelines are not created for a large enough flow for a huge expansion. OPEC cuts off production when the price is not high enough.
The 2024 Statistical Review of World Energy shows that peak oil production for OPEC occurred in 2016 at 37.4 million barrels per day. In 2023, it was down to 34.0 million barrels per day.
Or maybe they remember what happened when they were left behind technologically and don’t want to be colonized again.
Self esteem and following popular trends might be driving them more than rational thinking. They copied the real estate boom that was prevalent in the NATO countries because they too thought, it would bring easy money.
Some races of humans may be more rational and think more long-term than others, but there is no such thing as rational humans. The rational human is a myth created by highly educated (rich people) to justify why they get to consume more resources.
“Some races of humans may be more rational and think more long-term than others, but there is no such thing as rational humans”
Correct on both points.
It is very hard, perhaps impossible, for most people to understand that they have been selected to have psychological traits. Try https://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Capture-bonding for an example.
In fact, you can take China’s real estate bubble, dominance in renewables, and emphasis on civilian aviation to prove they are not that smart. They only have one speed, perpetual growth.
Economic development is mandatory.
Even if a country does not industrialize due to incompetence, or interest, they will be dragged into
the global economy unwillingly, by NGOs at first, and later at gunpoint. They don’t have to successfully
industrialize they just need to appear to be trying to do so.
Wanting to be left alone and not develop is not an option.
I certainly see your argument. But China was growing regardless when they started all this. And these are, as Ivan says, all engineers and scientists. We really are a physical system governed by laws like the MPP.
I think the issue is the only forecast citizens are willing to consider is business as usual. Such a forecast can be used to indicate much more education and much more debt based investment in building airplanes and many other things. These optimistic projections have sort of worked in the past, but they work less and less well over time, as resources become more depleted.
Purchasing power dropping is not perceptible to most people because the energy differential is not that large yet, you can live pretty well off even if inflation was 30% higher. When it accelerates around now, the gig will be up. Most humans cannot imagine second-order consequences or higher, even first-order consequences are a challenge for 60% of the population.
You are aware that plenty of young couples are having babies, right ?
@Keith
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2024/08/21/todays-economy-is-like-that-of-the-late-1920s/comment-page-1/#comment-466122
Kulm’s answer
Prior to 1914, the genes of the elites were rapidly crowding out the genes of the poor in the British Isles.
Which is I continue to hold Brigadier Charles Fitzclarence, whom I call “Chucky” after the Satanic Doll in the movie Child’s Play, in the same regard as Gabby Princip the cross dresser and Joe Gallieni.
Chucky led 200/400 Worcestershires(records vary – it is 200 or 400, no one is really sure) and stopped the German assault for the Channel Ports at a place called Gheluvelt, in Flanders, which prolonged the Great War by 4 years.
The late Robert Firth, Ph.D (from Oxford), praised Chucky for doing ‘his duty’.
Kulm condemned Chucky’s action as the Greatest Fkup of the 20th Century.
There is only one single Firth prior to 1914 in Wikipedia. There are several Firths in there but all of them are after 1914.
Firth is a surname of forest rangers in the Midlands, and people with that surname were NOT prominent before 1914.
If Chucky and his 200/400 Worcestershires didn’t ‘do their duty’,Firth would have ended his days as a teacher in some desolate outpost of the Empire in Africa or Asia, probably unmarried,instead of earning a Ph.D from Oxford which would have had no place for a forest ranger’s line like himself.
The norm for people like Firth prior to the Great War was similar to Mr. Chips in the book Goodbye Mr. Chips. A middling talent from a middling family who graduated from a middling school, he becomes a Latin teacher in a middling school, does not reproduce and ends his day near the school where he was stuck for life. (In the movie, to add more luster, Chips does get a romantic interest who was a suffragette and does not reproduce, and is called a Cambridge graduate)
But thanks to Chucky’s fkup, sorry, ‘doing his duty’,people like Firth crept into the higher echelons of UK, and we are all seeing what that has wrought.
All the genetic progress wiped out at Somme and Passchendale, replaced by people like Firth who chose to abandon England in his life and chose to live in Malta later in his life.
The Great War basically killed off the potentials of Europe and replaced the talents with less qualified brains from USA, Canada and Asia. An incalculable damage for which Chucky and his 200/400 Worcestershires significantly contributed so the lower and lower-middle class of UK could live a better life for a century and waste more resources, and what did they give to the world ? The Beatles?
Jan’s comment
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2024/08/21/todays-economy-is-like-that-of-the-late-1920s/comment-page-1/#comment-466029
Kulm the Status Quo answers.
As the resource base contracts, it is necessary to concentrate the remaining resources into the hands of those who are still able to utilize it , not to let others who are much less able to use these resources efficiently to waste such valuable materials including the Saudis.
That process won’t be easy or pretty, and lots and lots of humanitarian tragedies will occur, but as the Kageyu (inspector) in the movie Hara Kiri has said,
“The World does not turn to Emotional Tales”.
As far as Civilization is concerned , if 90% of all pop perish but the highest 10% survives, the net effect is extremely minimal.
Very hard but necessary choices will be made, and those not part of Civilization won’t have any say over it, no more than what a box of noodles might have a say as the pot is boiling.
I’ve long suspected that EROI’s calculations are largely wrong, and ignore a large part of the life-cycle energy costs of renewable energy infrastructure. I recently came across a controversy concerning the EROI of photovoltaics in Switzerland and other regions of moderate insolation.
The conclusion is that “The result of rigorously calculating the “extended ERoEI” for regions of moderate insolation levels as experienced in Switzerland and Germany proves to be very revealing. It indicates that, at least at today’s state of development, the PV technology cannot offer an energy source but a NET ENERGY LOSS since its ERoEIEXT is not only very far from the minimum value of 5 for sustainability suggested by Murphy and Hall (2011) , but is less than 1.
• Our advanced societies can only continue to develop if a surplus of energy is available, but it has become clear that photovoltaic energy at least will not help in any way to replace the fossil fuel. On the contrary we find ourselves suffering increased dependence on fossil energy. Even if we were to select, or be forced to live in a simpler, less rapidly expanding economic environment, photovoltaic technology would not be a wise choice for helping to deliver affordable, environmentally favourable and reliable electricity regions of low, or even moderate insolation, since it involves an extremely high expenditure of material, human and capital resources.”
the original paper (2016):
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516301379
The debunk (2017- Ugo Bardi is one of the authors)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516307066
the answer: (2017- With a reference to Gail Tverberg)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421517302914?via%3Dihub#bib13
It’s quite a long read, but well worth it to understand how EROI calculations work and how this is easy to manipulate the data to come to the desired conclusion.
I have met Ferruccio Ferroni. He is a retired professor in Switzerland who wants to “tell it like it is.” Solar panels are not working in Switzerland, and he wants the world to know it. He writes because he is concerned about the real situation.
There are a whole lot of things wrong with the EROI calculation for solar.
I also know Marco Raugei, who is the lead author of the supposed debunk. He is an academic article in the UK. He is really pushing solar. My writings are usually published on Linked in. Whenever I say anything negative about solar, Marco writes a long dissenting view.
Ugo Bardi would like EROI to work a whole lot better than it does. He writes for the Club of Rome, quite often, which is an optimistic “green” organization.
Nutrient density: high nutrient density requires live soil
Nutrient density could disrupt the entire food industry
https://youtu.be/fdzrwGLJVOA?si=bipPQhrd3gMI5VFf
Of course, you do not need plough the soil, you just need to add organic matter to it, not just take the organic matter from it.
“Of course, you do not need plough the soil, you just need to add organic matter to it, not just take the organic matter from it.”
You have to put back what you take away in crops. Nitrogen can be fixed by soybeans, but phosphorus and potassium plus minor elements that are taken away in crops must be replaced.
This assumes that people keep eating food grown on dirt.
Most of the losses are due to leakage/percolation past the root depth, not due to herbivory. Major crops only have roots to 1-1.2 meters at maturity. rotation with alfalfa or sugarbeet fertilizes the soil due to the fact they reach down to 3m and harvest nutrients unavailable to, say, wheat. they then deposit some of those nutrients in the top soil, even if the alfalfa is harvested. half the mass of a plant is normally in the roots.
that’s interesting. i had a look for other deep rooted crops and mustard, chicory and sunflowers are similar (i have almost pure clay soil so these are all good for that, too). a related, informative link (“Digging Deeper for Agricultural Resources, the
Value of Deep Rooting”): https://www.cell.com/trends/plant-science/pdf/S1360-1385(19)30332-2.pdf
http://soilandhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/01aglibrary/010139fieldcroproots/010139toc.html
http://soilandhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/01aglibrary/010137veg.roots/010137toc.html
thanks. i think it says something about modern agriculture that the useful books about maintaining soil health were published a century ago.
“half the mass of a plant”
In the long run you still have to return the elements you take away in the crops. Conservation of mass applies even to dirt. This is well understood.
thanks. If this was a significant problem, agrarian civilizations would last tens of thousands of years. but they do not. percolation does work even against forests, but it takes tens of millions of years or more, since roots get to 10 meters plus, and re-absorption within the root depth is a negative exponential. In fact, rain forest soils are generally already depleted.
China and India had continuous civilizations in existence for tens of thousands of years so agrarian civilizations do have longevity.
If they had embraced free markets back then. they would have had us in outer space by now.
lets hope you’re being ironic—or something
if not-then –such a load of rubbish is staggering in its concept—moreso, since you nick yourself as ‘investor guy”–invest as much as you like—your ”investment” cant grow faster than trees, business cant move faster than the sailing ship or the farmcart–ie a walking pace—ever.
thats why agrarian societies stay agrarian
agrarian means living off the land–ie consuming only the energy that grows in the short term–the lifecycle of trees and plants and animals.
which is why agrarian societies never get ”off earth”.
”markets” have nothing to do with it, free or otherwise.
instead of consuming current plant life—we started consuming 100 million year old plant/animal life.–and have done so for the past 3 centuries.
that’s what got us off earth, and why it will be very short lived.
Even if the cities within the agrarian civilization collapsed, quite a bit of the farming continued. So from an outsider’s perspective, the civilization went on. But, still, there was a problem with overshoot and collapse. It affected the urban areas most, since they were dependent on imports from the rural areas. If there wasn’t enough to go around, they got left out.
“quite a bit of the farming continued.”
It depended on the circumstances. The 1177 BC collapse seems to have mostly been drought, so little rain that the harvest was zero. That caused a population decline of 90% or even more.
I don’t think historical China ever got hit that hard, but I don’t know.
American native Indian first seeing white settler ploughing cleared field
Says…”Wrong way Up”.
We should have listened to that Bison hunter.
“Says…”Wrong way Up”.”
The main reason for plowing is to bury the weeds. AI weeders will go through a field and deal with the weeds.
I know a funny family story where someone had a personal encounter with god, or thought he had.
I come from a long line of jokers on both sides of my family
This is a story about a great uncle on my mother’s side.
It happened back in the day when people had farm laborers who lived with them. Some relatives, some hired hands. One of the hired hands was always talking at the dinner table about how he was waiting for the call from god to go preach
One day when this guy and my great uncles were out hoeing weeds, my great uncle pulled himself up into a dense china berry tree at the end of a row where preacher to be guy was chopping weeds
When the guy got under him, my great uncle said in a deep voice from overhead “GO PREACH”
The guy looked around wildly and my great uncle said it again.
According to the story, the guy threw down his hoe and ran off, never to be seen again
Did he go preach? not known, not part of the story
depending on where you are, the reason may be different. the main reason for plowing (in early May for us) is to improve bacterial respiration (ie, fertilization) and loosen the soil for seeds planted at 3 cm depth, and yes, also break the roots of biennial weeds. We are able to clean a field by immediately planting an aggressive cover crop (at our latitude this is rye and vetch), and cutting early (July) for silage. this is murder on weeds that are flowering right then, silage too wet then but we can mix with straw. we are fortunate that we only plant for silage or straw, but generally the field in september after silage is clean enough (in fact, really clean) to plant rye or wheat for winter without further cleaning.
Another way to deal with weeds which has only been done on a small scale is to microwave the soil, make it hot enough to kill the weeds and weed seeds. If power from power satellites ever become excess, that’s one thing that it could be used for.
sometimes keith
mere eyerolling is just not enough
What is your objection?
weedkilling with excess energy from power satellites is too much mental acrobatics for a mere mortal like me to deal with.
but i would like the name of your calculator supplier.
Growing rice in paddies is also partly a weed control exercise. Keeping the paddy flooded continuously for the first four to six weeks gives the rice plants a chance to grow big enough to out-compete most weeds.
In modern times, it is usual to apply an initial sprinkling of herbicide (No! Not Roundup!) to form a film on the water surface that helps kill those unwanted weeds, but the long period of emersion is in itself a weed control measure.
I am afraid that it will be difficult to actually produce very much more nutrient dense food, and sell it at a high enough price to justify the greater effort that goes into it. Grocery stores have limited shelf space. Having space for some organic food is enough of a problem for them.
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/visualizing-5-trillion-global-commodity-exports-sector
Oil and its products account for 30% of global commodity exports on average, valued at $1.5 trillion annually.
When including natural gas, electricity, and coal exports, the energy sector contributes 40% to the value of global commodity export per year ($2 trillion).
Agricultural exports ($1.9 trillion) rank second and are higher in value than mineral exports ($1.4 trillion).
Within agriculture, crops and forestry has the lion’s share of value at $1.2 trillion. This category includes everything from wheat to wood exports.
Meanwhile, the minerals sector is more equally divided between base metal exports (like copper, iron, and aluminum) and precious metals and stones (gold, silver, diamonds).
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/VORO_International-Commodity-Tra.jpg
Get ready to enter the copper age
https://m.economictimes.com/opinion/et-editorial/get-ready-to-enter-the-copper-age/amp_articleshow/112746966.cms
We may be entering our second Copper Age – the first one, the Chalcolithic (copper+stone) Age, spanning 6,000 to 4,000 years ago, being the period when humans first used metal. This time around, AI, automation and energy transition, with copper at their core, is driving up demand. The world will have to mine more of the metal now than it has in its entire history. China, which is at the forefront on all three technological revolutions, accounts for well over half of global copper imports, and its stockpiles have a bearing on record prices reached earlier this year. A rare surge in Chinese exports has confounded commentary of a structural bull market in copper. A short squeeze in the US allowed the Chinese an export window. China’s dependence on the Democratic Republic of Congo for its copper imports frees up the other top producers, Peru and Chile, to supply to the rest of the world. New mines are being developed in South America and Africa. But supply is likely to trail industrial demand for better part of this decade.
Mine more copper than entire History…imagine that trick, written as a matter of fact but
India needs to move fast in securing mineral supplies given the scale of its energy transition, as well as the defined window to offer global manufacturers a China+1 destination. But it’s entering the race late after the era of cheap copper mining is over. Better late copper than never.
The era of cheap everything is over my friend
i may be wrong
but somehow i dont see copper hammers and chisels being popular with the building trade
Right, what a clown show we are in, Norman.
Yep, the building trades in the future will require a different set of materials….
Suppose tents, yurts and hutches may come back ..
Oh, they already are …for the homeless and disenfranchised..
Lots on YouTube regarding Florida Condominiums and HOA requirements to be fully vested now and increase in monthly fees.
Not only that, but pity the poor mobile home lot renters.
Hedge fund investor groups buying parks and squeezing monthly rates through the roof.
Poor fixed income retirees are now forced out…
Got to love our ownership investor maximize profit motive…it works …for a select some…well now an elite
PS..my money is on wooden pegs instead of steel nails
Read once dilapidated dwellings were once burned down just to retrieve the nails.
I imagine the big increase in copper use relates to EVs and perhaps more electrical wiring. I found this article:
https://news.umich.edu/copper-cant-be-mined-fast-enough-to-electrify-the-us/
Copper can’t be mined fast enough to electrify the US
All of the details that make electrification of much of the economy impossible!
but apparently they built the pyramids with copper chisels
so all is not lost
Is that right, Norman?
And there was me thinking they built them out of stone blocks!
noooo
thats where the tradition started of putting a penny under the foundation stone of new building
and copper is shiny too
“but apparently they built the pyramids with copper chisels”
They cut granite with copper? I expect even you don’t believe that, Norma, hence the “apparently”. The copper chisels are real but must have been used for something else.
well iron wasnt used
so what else dyou suggest
Read or watch Christopher Dunn. He is a serious and intelligent engineer – a Lancastrian now living in the USA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz6Ja_4q6gA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3g84tnOCrI
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=christopher+dunn&i=digital-text&crid=2CGC5TQ7PTNMR&sprefix=christopher+dunn
ok,,,so lets run with that zemi
you harvest ”clean energy” via the pyramids—then what?
acquisition of energy must have a purpose—so what was it?—you cannot just decide to levitate yourself off earth.
we harvest oil, and use it to move stuff and build stuff,—without purpose, oil just stays where it is.
there is not a single mechanical artifact, as far as i know, in all history of ancient eygpt, that moves anything other than by muscle power.
they had the wheel, but nothing was attached to the wheel
there is documented written history going back 000s of years, the romans moved in as well, later the muslims, they had no mechanical artifact of that nature, despite having books and writing.
just askin?
“just askin?”
Open your mind and read Chris Dunn. But I know you won’t. He surmises that this stuff goes back way before the ancient Egyptians and helped to power a hi-tech civilisation that built similar pyramids around the world. There will be few if any artefacts from those times to tell us how they used their energy, other than to build such massive structures in the first place.
Some geologists who have looked at the Egyptian pyramids have noted weathering, and even water damage, that must have long predated the ancient Egyptians. But scientists take an age to change their opinions, because they are up against “experts” who protect the current orthodoxy. “Everything you know (or think you know) is wrong”, as the saying goes. Not everything, but a few big things, including the availability of eternal cheap energy.
zemi
wish science isnt science
wishing that a high tech society existed pre ice age, will not make it so—but stripped to basic reality, it is no more than that.
my reasoning is through logic. i could write books on fantasy science too, but i dont write bs.–well not much anyway.
unlimited free energy is bs….nothing more.
the level of any society is governed by the energy available to it, and the leverage supported by that energy.
which is why pre 1700 we had a farmcart and sailing ship economy.—sails and wheels are just levers.
so—— a high level of energy availabilty means nothing at all without the necessary levers to put it to work.
as to pyramids, —pour a quantity of earth, sand or gravel, and it will form a pyramid—anywhere in the world.—no alien science involved, just gravity and physics.
granted—there are things the egyptians did that we can’t figure out, i ask questions there myself, and would like to know.—- but that is not an excuse for ”higher civilisation”
there has never been such. —-wishing otherwise is beyond sense or discussion, but if you remain convinced, that is your entitlement.
“wishing that a high tech society existed pre ice age”
I don’t WISH it existed, nor do I know the timescale. I listen to the logic of an intelligent engineer who has visited the site. Unlike you, he doesn’t just sit at home writing instruction manuals. Your comments have more holes than a Swiss cheese, because you don’t check the evidence.
Clearly your mind became closed around the age of 15, and you cannot engage with new ideas. Therefore my trying to engage with you is a waste of time, as I should have learned long ago. Tim is more up my street.
Believing that our hi-tech civilisation is the only one ever on Earth is like those medieval Christians who believed that the Earth was at the centre of the universe.
lol
high tech civilisation must use powered levers
why?
because people must eat, and food intake can only be satisfied a 2 ways
1—hunter gathering, which is a full time job in itself
(no spare time to build cities or cars etc. (check the inuit)
or 2, by paying/enslaving someone else to get food for you.
if you choose the latter, you must live in a surplus energy economic system (no alternatives)–the more surplus you have, the bigger infrastructure you can build. (using extraneous energy inputs)
possibly a third way if you live on the sun warmed belt of the earth where food grows easily–if you live there and build pyramids, you need lots of spare time—which the sun gives you.
ever wondered why pyramids were never built outside the sun belt?
Surely if this universal free energy thing was available, they would have built them in, say New Zealand, or Antartica, or Greenland–with free energy you can do anything
—or is that too blindingly obvious to accept?
That obviously never occurred to whassname writing his books either.
Stonehenge was built before the pyramids–you would have thought those high civ guys would have lent a hand with that…mean not to.
but what do i know?—my mind is closed.
any previous high tech civ had to be governed by these rules….
you cannot have life without calorie intake, which must be harvested from elsewhere.–this is a universal law. harvesting requires effort.
and yes–i was good at writing op instructions too.–40 years freelance must count for something—it depended on logic as above.–making sure nobody killed themselves on my sayso.
do tell how you earned your daily crust?
But Europe build a lot of cathedrals rather than pyramids, with its surplus labor.
the thread of this exchange wove itself around the odd notion that pyramids were built by some higher form of civilisation in prehistory, who had access to some form of infinite energy resource, which dispensed with the laws of physics, and cut and levitated stones at will.
….ignoring the obvious, that such buildings were only built in the global equatorial sunbelt, and nowhere else.—hence ”surplus energy” in the form of food .
The Nile delivered a surplus food supply each year,
the purpose appeared to concern itself with ”afterlife” in some way.
that is the commonality with cathedrals, but we know exactly how they were built, in detail, of materials and time and purpose. we have drawings of man-powered lifts for stones.
as to surplus labour, a cathedral took about 100 years to build.
a pyramid might only take 20 years
that in itself gives an indication of how much surplus labour was available. men cant move large blocks of stone without lots of surplus food.
the critical factor is always food-energy supply.
we build vast buildings much faster now, only because fossil fuels are added to the levers of construction.–we dont lift stones using man-powered hamster wheels, or make iron tools with water powered furnaces.
“electrification of much of the economy impossible!”
Copper isn’t the only conductor, aluminum does even better and is lighter.
But it will take some development to make it work. It didn’t do so well as house wiring.
I understand that most long distance transmission wire is aluminum. Copper wire is too heavy.
“I understand that most long distance transmission wire is aluminum. ”
That’s been the case for decades. Such wires used to be centered around a steel core, but now they use some light and very strong polymer.
I remember seeing where tornado damage had broken all the aluminum conductors and left this yellow core. Because of skin effect (the current is AC) the center of a power cable does not contribute much to the capacity of the wire. That’s also why high capacity transmission lines are broken into bundles of wires. I have seen as many as 6 wires in a bundle.
Offshore wind, especially in the US, is incredibly expensive.
https://mishtalk.com/economics/new-york-to-pay-155-per-megawatt-hour-for-wind-current-rate-is-36-per-mwh/
New York to Pay $155 Per Megawatt Hour for Wind, Current Rate is $36 Per MWH
Do they have much experience operating these monsterous things out in the ocean? It seems they’re trying to do this in theory.
There is offshore wind in Europe, but I believe it is mostly in shallower water. I have heard that in Europe, they have to have people living offshore, near these wind turbines, to make repairs as needed. Sometimes helicopters are required. The salt water cuts back the life span of the wind turbines. Expensive. Transmission of electricity to shore is expensive, too.
The NYC unions are drooling over the live offshore 24/7 doing dangerous work. $2000/hour?
“. $2000/hour?”
Seems plausible.
At those wage prices, the turbines will become super-efficient and will become very cheap to operate in the next ten years. Mark my words. In ten years, offshore wind turbines will offer consumers the cheapest electricity in human history.
The market works. Just let it WORK.
I would like to see a summary of your investments!!
Pay people $1m an hour
that will get the economy going!!!
Actual money is created ONLY at the point of energy conversion.
Any other kind is ultimately debt.
You will be able to power your Smartphone with a mini-wind turbine sitting on top of your head.
Green energy, the gift that keeps giving and giving. Green-tards need to be careful, what they wish for.
And when it is time to dispose of the blades:
https://cowboystatedaily.com/2024/08/21/why-old-wind-turbine-blades-arent-being-buried-in-landfills-anymore/
“That’s not happening much anymore as landfills require them to be ground up “into really tiny pieces,” which is expensive.”
Lots of energy involved, I am sure, in grinding up wind turbine blades. We don’t have the energy to do that. Need the energy for worthwhile causes.
Insanity!
I hear you, brother!
We are living in a time of unprecedented opportunity and abundance. For some reason, some people think everything is going to fall apart.
Sure, we have some challenges but nothing we can’t overcome with ingenuity.
You just need a cubic mile of platinum right?
WE HAVE UNPRECEDENTED ABUNDANCE! ALL YOU NEED IS AN ABUNDANCE MINDSET! IF YOU’RE NOT RICH, ALL YOU NEED IS A BETTER ATTITUDE!