|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Economic growth and added complexity sound like they would be good, but at some point, the combination gets to be too much–simplification is needed.
Too much of the world’s income starts going to non-working individuals and to high-earning workers in privileged fields. Ordinary working citizens start to say, “Wait a minute, there is not enough left for my everyday expenses. The system needs to change.” Elections lead to the selection of politicians who want war, or who want to overturn the current system. The system then changes in a way that leads to less spending on healthcare and other complexities.
In this post, I will try to explain a bit of the underlying problem and give some hints at what the simplification might look like. Part of the problem is too little energy supply. This is a problem that cannot be told to the public; it would be too distressing. In this post, I present the result of a recent academic study that has attempted to recalibrate the findings of the 1972 Limits to Growth study with updated data.
[1] Economies of all types tend to operate in cycles.
Economies need both resources and human participants. Human populations tend to increase in number if conditions are favorable. When population grows, resources per capita, such as arable land and fresh water, tends to fall. Adding complexity helps an economy work around falling resources per capita.
With added complexity, it is possible for resource extraction of many kinds to grow, at least for a time. Deeper wells can sometimes add more fresh water supply. Irrigation and fertilizer can be used to increase crop yields. International trade allows the possibility of getting resources from more distant lands. Adding debt allows factories to be built and to be paid for “after the fact,” using the sales of the goods produced by the factories. Ever-larger governments allow more roads, schools, and services of all kinds.
The use of added complexity helps keep economies growing for a long time, but at some point, things start going wrong. Oil wells and other types of resource extraction become more expensive to build because the easiest to extract resources tend to be used first. Pollution becomes more of a problem. Universities start producing more graduates with advanced degrees than there are job openings paying enough to justify studying for those degrees. Healthcare costs become hugely expensive. Increasing interest on debt becomes a huge burden, both for governments and individual citizens.
When added complexity reaches a limit, citizens sense a problem. They tend to vote the current governments out of power. Or they become rebellious in other ways. I think the world has already reached a complexity limit.
[2] At some point, the added complexity trend needs to shift toward simplification.
When added complexity no longer has sufficient payback, the system seems to sense this and starts pushing economies in the opposite direction. Often, the wages of ordinary workers become too low, relative to the cost of living. They rebel and overthrow their governments. Or central governments may collapse, as the central government of the Soviet Union did in 1991. This happened after oil prices were low for an extended period. The Soviet Union was an oil exporter, depending on oil exports for tax revenue. Revenue from collectivized agriculture was underperforming, also. Thus, getting rid of a layer of government, or too many government programs, seems to be one common theme of simplification.
Another issue today is international trade. Crude oil supplies per capita are low. Somehow, international trade (which uses crude oil) needs to be cut back.
With inadequate total oil supplies available, it becomes very desirable to do manufacturing close to home, rather than at a distance. This is a major reason for the competition in manufacturing between the US and China. If the US can manufacture locally, it will provide jobs and save some of the limited world crude oil supply.
Another issue is the oversupply of workers with advanced degrees, relative to the number of jobs requiring such degrees. A study released in early 2024 indicates that only about half of US college graduates are able to obtain a job requiring a college level degree within a year of graduation. In fact, the majority of those who cannot obtain a job requiring a college-level degree within a year after graduation remain underemployed 10 years after graduation. Pretty clearly, the number of college graduates needs to fall.
I showed in Figure 1 that US healthcare costs are very high, but they have recently been on a plateau. Perhaps these high healthcare expenses might make sense if US life expectancies were longer than elsewhere, thanks to all this spending. In fact, US life expectancy at birth is lower than in any other advanced nation. The CIA Factbook ranks the US life expectancy as 49th from the top in 2024.
Figure 3 (above) shows a chart I found several years ago, showing how US female life expectancy has been dropping, relative to other high-income countries.
Figure 4 shows that US life expectancies have continued to fall relative to other advanced economies. Something is clearly going wrong with health in the United States. It is no wonder that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wants to “Make America Healthy Again.”
There is also the question of the level of US healthcare spending, relative to GDP. The share for the US, from Figure 1, is about 17%. The shares for the EU, the UK, and Japan are each about 11% according to the World Bank. The share for Russia is about 7%; for China it is about 5%.
Another issue mentioned in the introduction is the proportion of government spending that goes toward non-working individuals. The chart below shows how US Federal Government funds are spent. When the budget is prepared, often many of these programs are lumped together as “Mandatory Spending,” so we don’t see precisely what the spending is for.
Typically, the arguments about spending are on the parts of the budget other than mandatory spending. The problem is that all parts need to be funded, one way or another. Social Security describes its program as largely pay as you go. Mostly, the payroll taxes collected from today’s workers are used to pay benefits to today’s recipients.
Keeping the system working as it does today becomes a problem if the total amount of goods and services produced starts falling at some point. For example, if the total food supply at some point (say 2050) becomes too low, there is a question regarding which citizens should get inadequate food rations: the workers, or those receiving benefits under a pension program for the elderly. I would vote for the workers getting adequate food, if we expect them to continue to work. This issue suggests that at some point, the elderly may have to go back to work to get an adequate share of what is being produced.
[3] I see the results of the recent US presidential election to be a call for simplification: getting rid of the unneeded pieces of the system.
Donald Trump and his team clearly have a much different view of how the government should be operated than Joe Biden did. In particular, the new team would like to get rid of what they see as unneeded parts of the system.
There seem to be many other parts of the world encountering somewhat similar political and funding difficulties. Germany is dealing with a collapse of government. France is facing political and budget crises. Even China’s economy is having huge difficulties.
[4] I see the underlying problem as not enough resources, especially energy resources, for the rising world population.
It is not only oil that is in short supply (Figure 2); coal is also in short supply, relative to world’s population (Figure 6).
Uranium is in short supply, as well. The issue for uranium is that the world’s supply of nuclear warheads that could temporarily serve as a supplement to currently mined uranium is running short. These warheads belonged primarily to the US and to Russia, but Russia has sold a substantial amount of its warheads to the US, to be down-blended for use in nuclear power reactors.
Without enough energy resources per person, the world will likely need to produce fewer goods and services in total. Some uses for energy products, and for the goods and services that can be made with energy products, need to disappear.
Now, all parts of the world need to re-examine energy uses that are currently being made and look for uses that the economy can most easily get along without. For example, the step-down in oil consumption per capita that occurred in 2020 seems to be still having some effect. Some people are still working from home, saving oil that would be used for commuting. Some long-distance airline flights were eliminated, as well, particularly in Asia, reducing jet fuel consumption.
The self-organizing economy tends to push the world in the direction of contraction. How this will work is not at all clear. Most people didn’t understand the response to Covid-19 as a way to cut back oil consumption. It is possible that future changes will, to some extent, come from cutbacks directed by government organizations that are as difficult to understand as the Covid-19 restrictions.
[5] The book The Limits to Growth, published in 1972, modeled when world resources would run short, relative to growing world population. A recent analysis provides updated estimates, using the same model.
The original 1972 analysis, in its base model, suggested that resources would start to run short about now. An article called, “Recalibration of limits to growth: An update of the World3 model” by Arjuna Nebel and others was published earlier this year in the Journal of Industrial Ecology. The summary exhibit of their findings is shown here as Figure 8.
On Figure 8, Recalibration23 is the name given to the new model output. The BAU dotted line shows the indications from the base (business as usual) 1972 model. I found the coloring a little confusing, so I added the labels “Industrial Output” and “Population” to better mark what I consider the two most important model outputs. Food Production per capita is the green line, which is also important. The calculations are all made in terms of the weight of physical quantities of materials used, for the world as a whole. The financial system is not modeled.
We do not know how accurate a forecast such as this is. I know that Dennis Meadows, who was the leader of the 1972 Limits to Growth analysis, has said that once peak was reached, we could not expect the model to necessarily hold.
Even with this caveat, I find this forecast disturbing. Industrial output per capita (which would include things like automobiles, farm machinery, and computers) is shown as already steeply declining by 2025 in the updated model. This trend is much clearer than in the 1972 model. By 2050, industrial output per capita is a small fraction of the amount it was at peak.
Food output per capita is shown to start dropping about 2025. Based on my understanding of the 1972 Limits to Growth analysis, this change might reflect a shift away from meat-eating, rather than simply fewer total calories per person.
World population follows a curve similar to that of the 1972 Limits to Growth analysis with a peak in world population at perhaps about 2030.
In the updated model, pollution has been modeled as CO2 levels. This is different from the mix of pollutants used in the original model. The peak comes around 2090.
[6] Intuitively, the order of forecast changes for the world economy, shown in Figure 8, seems right to me.
Figure 8 indicates that world industrial production is expected to be the first type of output to drop. This makes sense if energy supply is quite limited or is high-priced. Without adequate inexpensive energy supply, a country is likely to cut back on manufacturing its own goods. Instead, it tries to buy from countries with less expensive sources of energy supply.
For example, US industrial production per capita has been falling since 1973. The year 1973 was the year when oil prices first spiked. US business leaders realized that changes were needed: A larger share of manufactured goods needed to be imported from countries with lower-cost fuel supply. Oil needed to be used sparingly because of its high cost. Coal, used heavily in Asia, was typically much cheaper.
China took the lead in industrial production after it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, but now it is running into obstacles. One issue is that China’s contribution to the world’s supply of goods is taking away high-paying jobs from other countries. Other countries are left with more low-paying service jobs. A second issue is that the US has become dependent upon China for critical materials, such as those used in military armaments. A third issue is that a great deal of China’s growth was financed by debt. As long as China’s exports were growing very rapidly, this was not a problem. But as growth has slowed, China’s debt has become difficult to repay with interest.
The level of conflict between China and other countries has grown, in part because it has become clear that it is not possible for industry to grow rapidly both in China and elsewhere, indirectly because of fossil fuel and uranium limits. The US applies sanctions against some Chinese companies and China retaliates by hoarding scarce resources. These include minerals such as antimony, tungsten, gallium, germanium, graphite, and magnesium.
The world is increasingly operating in a “not enough to go around” mode for scarce resources. At the same time, countries need to somewhat get along. So we get strange narratives in the press giving rationalizations for actions by both sides, without mentioning the shortage issue.
Figure 8 shows that once industrialization drops, food production also begins to fall, but not as quickly. This makes sense because everyone recognizes that food is essential. The falling calories likely reflect people increasingly moving from meat to vegetable products.
Somehow, world population becomes poorer, but the level of population does not drop nearly as rapidly as the drop in industrialization.
[7] Simplification is likely to take place in significant steps, perhaps at the time of strange events, such as those occurring in 2020.
These are a few ways simplification might take place:
[a] High level government organizations might start disappearing. For example, the European Union might not get enough funding and would stop. Or something similar could happen to the International Monetary Fund or the World Trade Organization.
[b] Programs that we expect to be funded by the US Federal Government might be handed over completely to the states, to be funded or not, as the finances of individual states permit. Examples might include Medicare, Medicaid, and even Social Security.
[c] There could be major banking problems, perhaps simultaneously in many countries around the world. The debt bubble holding up stock markets could pop. Governments would try to compensate, but they might not be able to do enough. Or governments could inadvertently create hyperinflation if there is virtually nothing to buy with the newly printed money created to offset widespread bank failures.
[d] There could be a great deal more sharing of homes and of apartments. The current arrangement of many single people living alone, either in an apartment or a stand-alone house could be replaced by many more roommate situations. Multi-generational families living together may become more common.
[e] Healthcare may become much simpler and local. Instead of seeing an array of specialists at a distance, people may walk to a local health provider. Medications from around the world are likely to drop greatly in quantity. Government programs to care for the seriously disabled elderly seem likely to be scaled back.
[f] Universities may be slimmed down greatly. There is no point in educating a huge number of individuals who cannot get jobs requiring a university degree.
[g] The huge amount of effort that goes into taking care of lawns in the US may disappear. Instead, people will put more effort into growing crops locally. Some people may choose to raise chickens, as well.
[h] International travel for pleasure will likely disappear, except perhaps for the very rich. Even business trips will become very uncommon. The amount of goods and services transported internationally seems likely to shrink.
[i] Many types of optional activities that now take place by car may be replaced by more local versions, which will be reached by walking, or perhaps by bicycle. For example, visits to restaurants may largely disappear, but eating with nearby friends or relatives in homes may increase. Visits to churches may drop greatly, as they did during Covid-19 restrictions, but they may be replaced by groups meeting in homes. Gyms for recreation may disappear, but people may obtain more exercise from their gardens and their need to walk to appointments.
[j] Very strange political leaders may take office. One person rule takes much less energy than transporting many representatives to a central location. Some of these leaders may take over as dictators.
Shell and BP would have merged long time ago but the liability to BP from Deep Water horizon are still not resolved . The decision makers for such a merger are The House of Windsor and The House of Orange — others don’t matter .
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-12-09/bp-chairman-needs-to-put-the-company-up-for-sale?utm_source=website&utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=twitter?sref=5dj0X2VO
What? They are both owned by the House of Rothschild. They must have their own reasons for not merging. Taxes of course, but Shell was more active in Russia until the end for example.
drb , the problem is that ” blue blood is blue blood ” . See past videos of US presidents curtseying to British royalty . Heck what did Harry , Meghan , William , Andrew and company do to receive such importance ? Nada . Best Lenin & company did was to got rid of this ” blue blood ” issue . No one talks about the Tsars except the historians . Good riddance to bad rubbish .
lol
you must be reading a single page history book
they got rid of the tsars, but kept the gulags
BP = British Petroleum doesn’t have good sound to it, for anyone who knows the path of British oil production over the last 20 years.
Not a political comment, a demographic one.
Trump is appointing many who are “young.” Whatever happens, it is time for a generational change.
Dennis L.
Passing GenX in favor of. Millennials
Thank goodness… baby boomers ha e hollowed out this country with their greedy fingers!
Always more to it bro Sammie,
Boomers Have a New Retirement Problem
Published Dec 09, 2024 at 4:00 AM EST
https://www.newsweek.com/boomers-new-retirement-problem-housing-1995432
Baby boomers have benefited from skyrocketing house prices over recent decades, with millions of homeowners born before 1964 watching their equity rise over recent decades. But now, thanks to a glut of unfavorable conditions in the U.S. housing market, boomers face a new retirement problem: affordable and accessible homes in which to age.
As a result, boomers are now “aging in place” in their current homes—a trend likely to induce a knock-on effect for younger generations.
According to a recent study conducted by Redfin, 78 percent of all boomers plan to stay in their current home for retirement. Another 2022 report from Redfin found that empty-nest boomers take up 28.2 percent of all “large homes”—three bedrooms or more—compared to 14.2 percent of millennials, who are much more likely to have their children still living at home.
While data isn’t available indicating how much this has changed over recent years, the tradition of downsizing into smaller homes designed with retirement in mind is becoming a distant, if not completely unlikely, prospect for America’s aging boomer population. While some may not want to move on from a house they’ve lived in for years on end, retrofitting existing homes for the sake of accessibility is a costly endeavor, particularly for older Americans living on fixed incomes
A lack of accessible homes required for some as they age are scarce—and a slowdown in new homes being built is a major factor. According to a report by CNBC in 2023, less than 5 percent of the U.S. housing supply is accessible.
Baby Boomers are at a stage where they want to move or downsize but cannot because of the lack of homes for sale which has driven up prices. That combined with the high cost of a new home due to increased interest rates and insurance costs are keeping them locked in homes with equity. This is also a major factor in the inventory shortage problem the market is facing.”
Heh, hehehe, …
Yep, what goes around comes around…if an old geezer does move, will probably face numerous difficulties.
Most have HOA fees that are ever increasing, than high property tax increase ( new homestead exception if applicable),
Not to mention getting acclamated to a new area with new social ties.
….sure they will. From article
One solution is to significantly increase funding, subsidies, tax credits, and/or zoning flexibility to allow for the construction of affordable senior housing so that seniors have somewhere affordable to move, given that many may only live on Social Security and little else,”
Not to mention health ..named boomeritist…replacements of knees, hips, pacemakers ECT.
What a mess we gotten ourselves into
Cry me a river Mike… the boomers suck….they will now want no taxes on social security while they completely drain it of all liquidity. They have sucked the last of oil in America by draining the last remaining reserves driving huge r.v s all over the country and crying every time oil price gets high
You would’ve done the same junior…
Can tell you that you are screwed and cry about all you want…it’s spilled milk under the bridge.
Us old farts vote and whine the loudest.
Take care of me….
Enjoy the warmer climate we provided for you too
I love boomers because they get blamed for everything. Seems like the mobs will be coming for them before they come for me.
We have far more buildings of all kinds than we need right now. Multigenerational families have been a tradition in the past. Or roommate/housemate groups can live together. The last thing we need is more small homes to try to heat, provide utilities to, and to provide paved roads to.
Guess: This means a return to a family which is made possible by religious beliefs. Religions seem to work and we as humans are biology, we live and work in groups which while not perfect are good enough. A group cannot work with too much conflict, genetics and a common religion are helpful even when not convenient.
Dennis L.
We can hope so. We need order to the system and religions help provide order. Other methods can work, if there is enough surplus energy, but they fall apart as surplus energy disappears. Joe Biden and his son seem to consider themselves outside the justice system.
I miss Fast Teddy like a hole in the head …
ears, nostrils or mouth?
Miss any of those.
The comment section has gone to such a level of cornucopian dreaming.
I wish FE would come back and chase off those that pedal BS hope.
I sympathize completely.
My pet theory is that during the last few decades the increasing volume of science-fiction, both in literary and in cinematic form (and I enjoy sci-fi as much as anybody) has made many susceptible to this kind of thinking.
Another factor is the rise of the ‘digital world’ over that same span of time. The malleability of bits and bytes, and the ability of computer programs to sort and sift and produce data at vast speeds, has blinded many to the relative intractability of the physical world in which we all actually live.
” The malleability of bits and bytes, and the ability of computer programs to sort and sift and produce data at vast speeds, has blinded many to the relative intractability of the physical world in which we all actually live.”
I agree.
be careful what you wish for
you may have noticed that OFW has lots of fresh inmates now that the chief BS artist himself has departed.
Only the other day—I noticed him commenting elsewhere—still the same tired old stuff on vaxxing.—nothing else to say.
“tired old stuff on vaxxing”
For anyone who committed themselves to that particular narrative through their own irreversible actions, FE must have made pretty uncomfortable reading.
The whole affair showcased the technical hubris, of which you are usually an incisive critic.
i was referring to the whole fakerama
crisis actors in Ukraine when that started—moon landings—WTC collapse—school shootings were faked,—millions of covid dead—Fauci was working with the Chinese to kill us all off—–and so on.
then the childish se xual obsessions—the p’do mania if someone disagreed with him–(have you noticed that that doesnt happen anymore?)
all amusing to watch—then just plain tiresome.
or maybe you thought that was all normal behaviour?
I am far from agreeing with FE on everything, and certainly not with his manner of expressing himself. In fact, all of that made it easier for some to dodge around the valid points he was making.
Unlike him, I don’t blame anyone for succumbing to the hysteria. Very few people have the time and the inclination, as most of us commenters on here seemingly do, to burrow down into these issues.
neither do i
but in my experience, when proven BS comes from a certain source, particularly in such an uneducated childlike and crude manner, then you can be 99.99% certain that everything else from that source carries the same level of credibility., unless proven otherwise independently.
Whatever anyone thinks about vaxxing the mandatory part has been put on hold for now and bau continues with the green transition being backed by the elders so good news all around in other words the great reset is in full swing.
i’m old enough to be an elder
or even one of the elite
but they won’t have me
i wonder why that is?
and i really want to be part of the great reset—or am i past it?
hehe ^^
Here’s another theory on the elders for you then (from Egon Fischer, but he blogs only in German):
When groups of humans constantly put their thoughts and feelings to the same thing – in an institution, or club, or within a house..
then an “Egregor” is created, a energy field that is alive and has a mind of its own, however it can only survive by being constantly fed with human emotions and thoughts.
The answer to the question “is there a small group of elders controlling the world” by Egon Fischer is thus:
No, there are only big Egregors interested in controlling the people (“capitalism”, “communism” and so forth are Egregors too btw), sometimes they cooperate, at other times not.
Thus humans in high positions often work in the same direction, guided by Egregors, but not consciously cooperating.
Egon Fischer is quite elaborate on the topic, with much more detail than I give.
While you Mr. Pagett appear to be holding a regular function on here too – as a public punching bag as it seems.
regards, Curt
most just swing and miss
—but i recognise that those less adept need practice, so i guess i’m as good a target as anyone else.
keeps me alert too
Norman gives as good as he gets.
If you’ve read the ad homs he’s directed at RFK Jnr. recently, all totally unprovoked, as RKF Jnr. has never taken any swipes at Norman, you’ll know that he’s no choir boy.
RFK Jnr. is a real public punching bag. Some of his detractors even make fun of the man’s speech impediment. Which is ironic as RFK Jnr. speaks a lot more sense with that impediment than his detractors do without it.
RFK is antivax
which only one stage removed from walking on water
Vaxine, when it doesn’t wipe out the disease, seems to have the same problem antibiotics. It seems to lead to surviving mutations that are resistant to the vaccine/antibiotic. It is not a long-term solution.
there are no long term solutions to disease.
humans just delude themselves that they are creatures destined by gods to rule the earth, exempted from the laws of physics.
when in fact, the dominant species here are the microrganisms which use us as mines and prairies..—they are unaware of our existence, and possess no capacity to care anyway.
Micro organisms exist to keep higher organisms in check.
we have held them at bay for little more than century, in contrast to their billions of years of rule.
we think that is the new order….. it isnt.
when this very short period of surplus energy ends, the micro-species will reassert thier authority.
RFK makes silly pronouncements to further his own ambition—to emulate his forbears—which he is obviously unqualified to do.
he is not alone…. in seeing trump as a ladder out of mediocrity.
“It is not a long-term solution”
There are no long term solutions short of ditching biology. It seems that the very first cells were attacked by viruses.
Antivax?
The man is free to choose whichever brand he wishes and it’s no business of yours norman.
https://www.vax.co.uk/
Norman, getting yourself serially injected with substances that mess with the immune system a form of self harm that is only one step away from allowing a quack to extract the stone of madness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_the_Stone
JFK is far from being anti-vax. You may be getting him confused with me.
Basically, I’m opposed to all forms of charlatanism that cause the victim physical or psychological harm, which is why I’m not opposed to horoscopes, homeopathy, or the laying on of hands. Even though they may have no scientific basis, they are not harmful by default.
However, this same consideration means I am anti-vax and bloody proud of it. Just as I’m anti-body piercing, anti-tatooing, anti-sodomy, anti-gender reassignment surgery, anti-hard recreational drugs, anti-tobacco smoking, anti-bungee jumping, anti-smartphone, and anti-vegan,, too name but a few intrinsically harmful activities that I would not attempt to prohibit but I nonetheless thoroughly discourage and disapprove of.
My philosophy is: If people are absolutely determined to mess up their lives or ruin their health, there’s not a lot the rest of us can do.
I do too, glad Norman has stepped up and followed him and providing likes and thumbs up 👍.
Norman is such a nice guy, there seems to be a special connection between the two of them.
Hope Fast is settling down this time and doesn’t have to relocate again to a new survival after BAU bugout spot…I’m resigned just to dieing place
i just tripped over one of his comments somewhere
can’t recall where now—i think he is now just a unit of ai circuitry, the words were just the same as always.
it wasnt banworthy, so i guess he’s cleaned up his act a bit.
Eddie will exist for eternity….bouncing around in cyberspace …Eddie always wished tobe worshipped and be Godlike.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iKHCD5mbIXI
Eddie’s dream as Lord Garth in Star Trek with his honey bunny girl
Not stalking him, by any chance.
i wouldnt want to risk inflating his ego to bursting point by giving the impression he is stalkworthy
That’s a yes then. Let it go Norman.
Tim
I just read this about your hero, RFK, —73 Nobel laureates have penned an open letter to congress, saying dont give him any kind of health authority
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/nobel-laureates-letter-senate_n_6757d39ee4b0012be3fdf074
Quote:
////////“The proposal to place Mr. Kennedy in charge of the federal agencies responsible for protecting the health of American citizens and for conducting the medical research that benefits our country and the rest of humanity has been widely criticized on multiple grounds,” the document reads. “In addition to his lack of credentials or relevant experiences in medicine, science, public health or administration, Mr. Kennedy has been an opponent of many health-protecting and life-saving vaccines.”
“The leader of DHHS should continue to nurture and improve — not threaten — these important and highly respected institutions and their employees.”
Richard Roberts, the winner of the Nobel in Physiology or Medicine in 1993, told the Times it was the first time in recent memory a group of laureates had gathered to oppose a Cabinet nominee. Roberts added that laureates tend to shy away from politics if possible, but described the Trump administration’s efforts to attack science as “very damaging.”///////
73 nobel laureates—all engaged in a hoax.
Fact remains Tim, that Trump will put literally anyone into office, in return for unqualified support (and/or money). He doesnt care what they do.–or dont do.
Musk comes under the same heading—he’s bought trump.
That is the lethality of dictatorship.
no doubt you will see that as funny—but there may be a few who won’t.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the US government is not run by Nobel laureates.
Can you read, Norman? The article says 77, not 72 Nobel laureates And I wonder how many of these 77 are in the Epstein Island visitor’s book?
Where the f…k were they all those decades while Anthony Fauci was murdering people with his AIDS policies, funding illegal gain-of-function research and torturing beagles?
Why didn’t I hear a peep out of any of them when Rochelle Walensky was appointed to head the CDC and went on to make numerous ineffectual public policy decisions — including vaccine and mask mandates, public guidance regarding immunity and testing, and published guidance that kept kids out of schools — policy decisions that wreaked havoc on American society and in many cases, were not based on scientific facts or data?
Is there a list of these 77 available?
I couldn’t find it. I’d like to know who they are and how many of them are medical researchers funded up to the eyeballs by Big Pharma and Big Government. I want to see the logos of their sponsors, like we see with star tennis players and FI drivers.
No, this doesn’t impress me any more than the 100 German scientists who contributed to the book One Hundred Authors Against Einstein (available on Amazon). Indeed, this wreaks of desperation.
Einstein responded to his critics: “To defeat relativity one did not need the word of 100 scientists, just one fact.”
RFK’s response should be to demolish the decrepit structure that has turned his country into the sickest developed nation on Earth and MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY again.
Norman, FE used to call you a “moreon”. That was unforgivably rude of him, but not a statement in totally conflict with the facts. You have almost no critical functions running and no intellectual viability at all. You are just plugged in to the MSM (Huff Post, for Godsakes!) and regurgitating whatever they feed you.
It’s absolutely pathetic, IMHO.
Tim
when i got to your line:
Fauci was murdering people—
i switched off.
too silly to warrant further attention
bye
“too silly to warrant further attention”
Yep.
Unnamed experts?
Norman wouldn’t just accept their word of unknown people, surely.
Unnamed experts published in dubious propaganda organs have a terrible track record.
I’m sure Norman(and Keith) remember the lies of the Lancet and the New England Medical Journal and their peer review experts.
https://forbetterscience.com/2020/06/05/would-lancet-and-nejm-retractions-happen-if-not-for-covid-19-and-chloroquine/
Probably not, just slink back into the darkness for a short while, only to reappear repeating the same tired falsehoods. As Martin Geddes* points out
“To denigrate something as conspiracy theory without having investigated the data is an act of cowardice. You cause an affront to those who offer the possibility that harm is being done to innocent people, just to avoid confrontation with your own fears of it being true.”
Your Einstein comment reminded me of this(from Johan’s latest).
Ehrenhaft came well prepared. He set up a few of his simple experiments in one of the country houses of Alpbach and invited everyone he could lay hands on to have a look. Every day from two or three in the afternoon participants went by in an attitude of wonder and left the building (if they were theoretical physicists, that is) as if they had seen something obscene.
Apart from these physical preparations Ehrenhaft also carried out, as was his habit, a beautiful piece of advertising. The day before his lecture he attended a fairly technical talk by von Hayek on ‘The Sensory Order’ (now available, in expanded form, as a book). During the discussion he rose, bewilderment and respect in his face, and started in a most innocent voice: ‘Dear Professor Hayek. This was a marvellous, an admirable, a most learned lecture. I did not understand a single word.’ Next day his lecture had an overflow audience. In this lecture Ehrenhaft gave a brief account of his discoveries, adding general observations on the state of physics. ‘Now, gentlemen,’ he concluded triumphantly, turning to Rosenfeld and Pryce who sat in the front row, ‘what can you say?’ And he answered immediately. ‘There is nothing at all you can say with all your fine theories. Sitzen müssen sie bleiben! Still müssen sie sein!’
The discussion, as was to be expected, was quite turbulent and it was continued for days with Thirring and Popper taking Ehrenhaft’s side against Rosenfeld and Pryce.
Confronted with the experiments the latter occasionally acted as some of Galileo’s opponents must have acted when confronted with the telescope. They pointed out that no conclusions could be drawn from complex phenomena and that a detailed analysis was needed. In short, the phenomena were a “Dreckeffekt” — a word that was heard quite frequently in the arguments.
Feyerabend. Against Method. 256.
Unfortunately, you will get nowhere with settled corporate science flat earthers, because no real world evidence is relevant, unless their masters tell them it is. Even them they can be made to do a 180° turn within days, multiple times and not a single one will lift their weak head and ask the blindingly obvious question.
More than anything, they fear being this boy.
https://youtu.be/EHAuGA7gqFU?feature=shared
*Martin Geddes: A conspiracy theorist apparently. I looked as don’t know him and there’s even a “scientific” paper about him that claims “conspiracy theorist” multiple times before supplying any evidence, but by the time you get to the end, you understand clearly that he’s a “conspi….
hold on, they provide nothing and it’s just a hit piece for the simple minded to grasp.
An interesting article on how the West has become the opposite of democracy.
Examples of: France with Macron who doesn’t want to resign with the result of the elections showing that he is dead, the French-born Georgia president who doesn’t want to resign because she doesn’t want to recognize the results of the elections and, at the same time, with EU supporting the Georgian president.
It is also hilarious that EU wants Georgia inside European Union, but Georgia is an Asian Country on the east side of Turkie!
With Romania’s supreme court which made substantially a coup deleting the result of the elections because the candidate is not the right one for EU/US and finally with Al Jolani, ex Al Qaeda-ISIS terrorist, who had a 10 million reward on his head for his capture, but who is now our good old boy for Syria…
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/cynical-overtakes-sacred-as-the-west
And to think that there are many, even in this forum, who think the West is superior. Or perhaps they think that, being closer to the core, they will never be treated like the Romanians.
Strange world! Democracy as long as the results come out the way we like.
Uranium from seawater is getting cheaper than mined uranium.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/12/uranium-from-seawater-is-getting-cheaper-than-mined-uranium.html
Organic polymer extraction has come a long way. But $150/kg is still relatively expensive. Even at this price, the cost of uranium would amount to $0.005/kWh of electricity in a standard light water reactor.
That is on par with today’s uranium price. So they should scale it up now, if their numbers aren’t BS, if for no other reason than national security.
We will see. Obviously if it works there is a lot of uranium in seawater.
especially in fukushima
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-09/nuclear-power-plant-twice-as-costly-as-renewables/104691114
What’s more, Mr Graham said that while Australia didn’t have any nuclear plants, it had plenty of black coal generators, which were analogous in many ways because they were designed to run full throttle most of the time.
And Australia’s black coal generators, he said, were operating at ever lower capacity factors as cheap renewable energy — particularly solar power — flooded into the market and squeezed out conventional sources.
Once we have decided to use wind and solar, they effectively push out any type of generation that has high front end costs because it becomes difficult to adequately pay back the cost of the other general over a much longer payback period. If we had enough fossil fuels and nuclear to supply our system, the calculation would be much different results. Hydroelectric doesn’t distort the system in the same way.
I think the issue is that we don’t have enough fossil fuels. It is not clear we have enough uranium either. So we are trying Plan B, with things that don’t work very well, and a funding system (based on having all of this variable supply) that doesn’t work well either.
I don’t know if a “utility type” pricing system would work any better. I know Hawaii has utility type pricing. With this, its electricity cost is very high. It still uses a whole lot of oil for electricity generation, making its electricity price very high.
All gone by 2038 which means black coal is nearly all gone for Australia so renewable energy and gas will power Australia forever
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10236613278498469&set=a.10208579906481689
Don’t know if this will post
The problem is the tricks the analysts play in determining status. Quite a few deaths occur in the first two weeks, after the first shot, and before the second. Before the vaccines are supposedly effective. These are left out of the analysis. These are bad reactions to the shots, and higher (rather than lower) chance of getting the disease.
“tricks the analysts play”
I don’t know exactly how they could mess with the data unless they are just falsifying it wholesale.
This is looking at the vaccine status of UK people who died from covid-19 over a 6 month period in 2021. The results are not surprising and we saw about the same from the US over that time frame.
Your chances of dying were reduced by about 40 fold between not being vaccinated and having two shots and enough time for your body to develop antibodies to the virus.
People are still dying of covid-19, friend of mine just spent a week in the hospital with covid-19, but I doubt vaccination status has as much of an effect on death rates. Practically everyone who was not vaccinated has antibodies by now from being infected. And the virus has mutated into a less lethal, but more infectious, version.
The bird flu version in dairy cows (raw milk anyone?) seems to be one mutation away from being able to spread between humans. When and if this happens it will be very interesting to see how many people reject the bird flu vaccine. The cases, they think from milk droplets getting into the eyes of farm workers, have mostly been mild, but the fatality rate for human cases historically has been 50%.
One ‘trick’, see the work of Norman Fenton, consisted as defining someone as ‘unvaccinated’ until two weeks after ‘full vaccination’
This describes the issue better than I did above. An awfully lot of the cases were in this period. The particular graph shown is at a very early period, also. January to July of 2021.
These are Covid-19 deaths. In early studies, there were more heart-related deaths than expected in the vaccinated, bringing their total death rate up.
Exactly. Why do people still think an RNA sequence injected in the arm can help with a respiratory disease? How do antibodies cross the lung-blood barrier?
This is just really basic stuff.
Keith, if and when I keel over from bird flu, you have full permission and my blessing to dance on my grave and crow about what an idiot I was.
I wonder, did the Powers That Be ever launch a psy-op that you didn’t get taken in by?
If you want to keep going down the vaccine protection route, be aware that age-related decline in immunity results not only in increased susceptibility to infection but also reduces the prophylactic efficacy of vaccinations. The two factors combined lead to increased risk of infections and mortality in older adults.
Medical opinion has it that at your age, if you aren’t being jabbed a dozen times a year, you are significantly at risk of death from a dozen different pathogens.
Alternative medical opinion has it that you should be boosting your vitamins and minerals, adequately exercising, getting plenty of sunshine and good nutrition, laughing and joking, thanking the Creator of the Universe, and not going within a mile of an allopathic medical practitioner or a Walmart unless you are carried in on a stretcher.
Unemployment and bankruptcy is just the final stage. There is a step by step worsening before, that can last for years.
You must have seen it.
That is what John Michael Greer had described as a catabolic collapse
People take out bigger and bigger loans, if they can. Forgo maintenance on their homes and cars.
Just returned from a cruise to new Zealand and the poor workers were working everyday for eight months straight from 6 am to 10 pm with no job security this is new reality for jobs slavery. I also met the cryptoking who was a trillionaire,I kid you not he was drunk at the time and so was I so I think this is the new world cryptocurrency.
Paris has changed – deteriorating, police, army
https://youtu.be/31iVDppkenw?si=ZRvgwqRiFLqD44y5
44-minute video. Some of the same problems as Chicago and San Francisco, but more police. More bike traffic. Changing rules will eliminate diesel powered vehicles in 3 year, if I understood correctly. I didn’t get through the whole video.
The pollution bollox on diesels (DPFs etc) is eliminating them effectively already, by making them unreliable and unusable.
The traffic system in France is structured around Crit’air stickers.
Vehicles are classified according to their age and degree of pollution. Below a certain classification, their circulation will be prohibited in certain metropolises, generally with ecologist elected officials (Scratch the green and you will find the brown national socialist), with different dates.
A diesel engine can circulate if it has the right sticker.
But clearly, the size of the fleet means that political decision-makers are starting to get really scared.
During the yellow vests episode, rioters set fire to the prefecture of Le Puy, and Macron had to flee shortly after.
A person who was inside the prefecture when it was set on fire told me that he had never seen such an outburst of hatred, especially among women.
Worrying!
Return of the poverty: the mini doses of food
https://youtu.be/lVLugYkcVe4?si=Ik8fPX2QZV8dB-24
Just going back to the natural state of humanity
It is justifiable in a utilitarian way
Western Countries are enjoying Assad’s fall made through HTS group, a Jihadist – Al Qaeda coalition defined by ourselves as terrorists.
A group composed by mercenaries coming from various Countries, including people escaped from Tagikiskan or Uzbekistan..
😀
The kind of groups that we all have been chasing all over the world for years, starting in Afghanistan for Osama Bin Laden and going on for the all others…
The same ones we were blaming for terrorist attacks, decapitations, creation of ISIS Califfates and so on.
And we are happy of what they have just done !
That’s hilarious.
Interesting that Putin has decided not to assist Assad militarily. Just as Russia has not tried to fight a more aggressive offensive “one fell swoop” war in UKR which would have resulted in more Russian casualities. I think Putin knows that he can bide his time in UKR. He knows that he will gain a lot more by conserving Russsia’s manpower, energy and material resources….only if they can be sold rather than wasted in war.
In other words, Putin may see the energy + debt walls closing in on the world better than any other leader.
Go to Russia and become murdered as a soldier for your Putin.
Who ‘wants peace’?
“2019 RAND Paper . . .
As far back as 2019, US Army-commissioned studies examined different means to provoke and antagonize Russia who they acknowledged sought to avoid conflict. “
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqVPM0KSUpo&t=5s
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3063.html
It’s OK to be a shill for the plutocrats and the MIC?
Yes Hubbs, it is also interesting that besides Turkey as a great winner of Assad’s fall, there is also Qatar.
Everybody now is talking about Turkey as a winner, but there is also Qatar.
At this regard there are two interesting articles.
The first article is a new one, from Jerusalem Post, about Qatar as winner.
And the other article is an old one, which described on Al Jazeera website the complicated map of possible new pipelines (still in the funnel now) for gas and oil.
These potential pipelines cross the Syrian territory, coming from different areas and with great competition among the key actors for usage and distribution to Europe.
1) As Assad falls and Iran weakens, Qatar gains influence across Middle East – analysis:
https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-832547
2) Syria’s Pipelineistan war:
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2012/8/6/syrias-pipelineistan-war/
No pipelines . It was the dream of Europe (NATO) to get Qatari gas to replace Russian gas . Trans border pipelines are a nightmare . Some examples ;
1. TAPI–Turkmenistan , Afghanistan , Pakistan , India pipeline — proposed in 1994 and nothing done .
2. Peace pipeline — Iran , Pakistan , India . Proposed 2015 — nothing done
3. India –Iran subsea pipeline — nothing done
4. Iran , Pakistan , China pipeline — work stopped because Baluch tribesmen killed the Chinese workers .
5, Even the easiest pipeline ( politically speaking) Russia — China via Mongolia has not worked out .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altai_gas_pipeline
You do not see all ramifications. Hezbollah supply lines have been cut. So I expect that the main result of Trump’s administration will be a tremendous territorial expansion of Israel. Have you heard “from the Euphrates to the Nile”? The first part of it is done. All Lebanese and Syrians will move to Europe (MG will be so happy).
This is all a very complex situation….I don’t understand the ramifications for it. Syria is a rich oil country. Trump for all his banter about domestic plans will be busy with global problems. I do think that Putin does understand the energy conundrum better than any other leader. I think he has lost a lot of young men of productive age. That will be a problem going forward unless he can absorb from another country. I think the west is trying to do the same to Russia as it did in the 1980’s …..
Sam, when we talk about West, we must admit that the situation is completely different from 1980.
In terms of Oil & Gas, Europe, except for some gas from Norway, but not sufficient from all the Countries, Europe has nothing.
Almost no Oil and almost no gas.
Therefore, for the part of the West concerning Europe, that part is totally dependent from outside and it CANNOT rule upon anyone.
Concerning US, it may be a different story, but for Oil, the situation about Shale Oil in general is not good and concerning fuels, about diesel US mainly needs imports of suitable Oil from other Countries.
For everyone (Europe + US) there is then the problem of ‘affordability’ of resources and necessary profits for extractors, which has been well explained by Gail lately.
In the end, I don’t think that we will see Russia collapsing, but Europe probably yes.
But Putin may be realizing that it will cost the Zionists and the western Anglo Americans dearly (energy, men, materials, more destabilizing debt) to maintain control over this Euphrates-Nile expansion. I think Russia has learned its lesson from the cost of trying to hold on to the old Soviet Union. My question is, how much support will Russia give to Iran?
Russia doesn’t need the oil, but it can’t allow the Zionists to get a hold of it either.
I think Lebanon is lost. I also think Israel does not need a lot. Just Lebanon, and a slice of Syria touching the Euphrates. Erdogan to take the rest. Intersstingly, this alliance may have legs as they move further into the Middle East.
There is no way Israel could expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. 350 million people live in the region. How will 7 million Jews be able to dominate over a few hundred million Arabs? Israel cannot last long-term. Jewish people would be safer moving to the United States than to live in Palestine, surrounded by people who don’t like them very much.
Strange world we live in.
The latest Q3 commentary report by G&R is here and is excellent . Please download .
https://www.gorozen.com/commentaries/2024-q3?utm_campaign=3762791-2024%203Q%20Commentary&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9h5xzUKFn_Vb1A5gcIjjc-c3nQonyK2MbERePPqI3MyEJD850kAj9d261vuIpTsIJYGAILE8-uSPi7wAC3Y5ukAV6QOg&_hsmi=337395361&utm_content=337395361&utm_source=hs_email
From the PDF:
Nuclear is seen as more efficient. I am not sure that by itself will make uranium prices rise.
I keep searching Nuclear to see if there is something we have missed. I do know that Sam Altman and Bill Gates are heavily invested in these industries more than ever. I do know that they probably have more information than any of us have. I do know that we are increasingly moving to an age of when only the truly wealthy will have information. The rest of us will only have controlled searches and b.s entertainment news.
In fact we maybe there already….
People having a heart attack or a stroke are being asked to get themselves to hospital after dialling 999 in some parts of England, as surging sickness levels plunge the NHS into another winter crisis.
https://www.thetimes.com/article/b9d2fb1c-0ecf-4eb4-ba7a-5c664810a76c?shareToken=e7f01e24eef4022f1274083db92cab66
One of my favorites from one who you’d least expect to cover it.
Girl from the North Country. “Please see for me that she’s wearing her coat so warm.”
That was really good. Thanks for sharing.
England is having trouble providing adequate ambulance service. With calls picking up at this time of year, the situation seems likely to get worse. Some patients are being asked to get themselves to the hospital.
Reuters: President Assad may have been killed in a plane crash while escaping
https://x.com/Worldsource24/status/1865706732548165813
Love Trumps hand squeeze of Macron. With a simple hand shake France is put in its place.
Who has the most untapped oil in the world?
the US
Thanks to the shale oil boom, the US is now sitting on more oil reserves than Russia, which estimates as having 256 billion barrels of untapped oil. The next-richest countries in terms of oil after that are: Saud Arabia (212 billion), Canada (167 billion), Iran (143 billion) and Brazil (120 billion).
When doing a search on oil this comes up on google. No wonder people think there is 100 years of oil
very few people grasp the point that we have created our current existence and prosperity on the surplus energy obtained from oil, not oil itself.
Even fewer grasp the point that we have created out current existence and prosperity on the neat things we have done with the surplus energy obtained from oil, not from the surplus energy itself.
Had we wasted all the surplus energy on making and eating Mars Bars, we wouldn’t have created our current existence and prosperity.
doing neat things with surplus oil is what provided your and my employment—and that of every other OFW inmate.
without all those neat gizmos, we would still be serfs and peasants .
some time ago, i read a very clever article, reducing the world economic system to the contents and manufacture of a mars bar—interesting
Who has the most diesel? Because that is all that matters.
Even Mr. Douglas on Green Acres needed diesel….
Episode summary – “Oliver’s groovy nephew (Chuck) arrives in Hooterville on his motorcycle with long hair, hip lingo and no interest in work. However, Chuck is excellent with motors and proceeds to “soup up” all the vehicles in the valley. (Including Oliver’s Hoyt-Clagwell tractor)” – Jay Phelps, imdb.com
From the episode “Uncle Ollie”. Season 1, episode 32. This was the last episode (season finale) of the first season. It originally aired on June 1, 1966.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DX08Xn0r0ac&pp=ygUTR3JlZW4gQWNyZXMgdHJhY3Rvcg%3D%3D
Two minutes clip, very funny…boy, those were the days..
The oil the US has seems to be awfully light–not good for diesel.
Dmitry Orlov recently made the point that the US is very dependent on Russia for a particular heavy oil that it needs to mix in with the light shale to make diesel and jet fuel.
Canadian bitumen or Venezuelan heavy oil will also work, I believe.
For those who do not think Putin is somewhat a pacifist, Damascus is Exhibit Z.
Another video talking about how bad the job situation is in China. It says that these companies try to hide their problems from the general public. It is only the workers in these companies that people hear about these problem. Even big State Owned Enterprises are affected.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy1MKfqaaWo
At the end of the video, it talks about companies that were in construction are turning to making big machines for agriculture. The problem with such machines is that they will put even more workers (agricultural workers) out of work.
Not sure yet, working on that one, large machines.
Farm prices are going down, fixed assets until paid for are a fixed cost; part of the issue is taxes, machines are purchased in good times to avoid/defer taxes as they are never avoided.
We never see the books of large farms until they collapse and that seems to happen with a long wave regularity. Are we close to one now? Costs are up even if they have recently trended down, commodity prices are down.
Farming with large machinery seems to be very hard on the land. AI is going to be a game changer in farming.
Time will tell.
Dennis L.
A banana in the fall
Eating rice from Sweden
Should overthink its bending
While hitting the wall
In a shitload of spending
If “BAU” without fossil fuels is feasible, why do such island areas which don’t have fossil-fuel resources of their own (including Hawaii), chronically import such fuels, to keep their lights on? Don’t they really put renewable-power-will-work beliefs to the test?
https://www.google.com/search?q=cuba+power+outage&oq=cuba+power&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqCggAEAAYsQMYgAQyCggAEAAYsQMYgAQyDAgBEEUYORixAxiABDIKCAIQABixAxiABDIKCAMQABixAxiABDIHCAQQABiABDIHCAUQABiABDIHCAYQABiABDIHCAcQABiABDIHCAgQABiABDIHCAkQABiABNIBCjE4MjYxajBqMTWoAgiwAgE&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Renewable energy has been tried over and over again on island areas. It doesn’t work, except with lots and lots of fossil fuel back up. I know Euan Mearns used to investigate this, with the help of a retired fellow who died a few years ago. There is always a problem of a huge amount of electricity at some times (perhaps more than needed) and none at others.
More important than life expectancy is years of poor health prior to death.
I don’t have a reference handy, but in most industrial countries with universal health care, the average years of poor health prior to death is under two. In the US, it is more like 15!
I don’t care so much how long I live, as how I am able to live.
I am always astounded at the bad health of many people I see around me.
I figured out 30 years ago that I couldn’t eat the American diet; it would make me sick. I read quite a few books about health, back then. I remember one book saying that our bodies couldn’t tolerate eating predigested food. There are other issues too–way too much meat and too much sweets. And way too much food, served at one time in restaurants.
i eat far too much junk food
havent seen a doc in years—apart from a recent painful knee—and even for that, a retired vet gave me a diagnosis for free at the gym—that it would fix itself—it has pretty much.
i think it has to do with a relaxed, but positive attitude to life, and constant physical and mental stimulation.
> i think it has to do with a relaxed, but positive attitude to life, and constant physical and mental stimulation.
… but most of all genes, man, genes!
Mediterranean diet is good.
The problem for US people is that they live less than in other developed countries, and that shorter life also contains 15 years of bad health.
So, the US economic system is working perfectly, then?
If the place is viewed as an enterprise, it makes a certain kind of sense to have most people pouring all their time and energy into getting into debt studying when young, then working like a dog to earn a living and funneling any discretionary income into consumer activities during their young and healthy years, then draining their life savings on healthcare or medicare in later life, and finally dying within about a decade of qualifying for their pension.
Looks like high tech feudalism, doesn’t it Tim?
My Mother lived to be 102, was under Hospice care for 2 years at home with her two children caring hor her. Before that was in poor health for many years and the Medical system kept her going at an exorbitant expense, which her providers cashed in…so , you are spot on with the 15 years of poor health.
I am certain that I will not receive the same treatment, nor do I wish to get it.
Oh what a web we weave .
” Syria will most likely face a long war on the ruins of the state in the style of Libya and Afghanistan. Millions of refugees and terrorists spreading across the region. ”
Maybe a new Arab Spring with all the hunger mouths to feed . Russian and Ukrainian crop has failed .
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/dire-russian-crop-health-ukraine-export-risks-threaten-black-sea-wheat-braun-2024-12-06/
Countdown to Arab Spring 2.0
https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/russia-raises-wheat-export-duty-by-nearly-a-third/
According to the article, this is primarily related to the poor condition of the winter wheat crop and the fact that current export tariffs have not reduced exports of wheat. Russia is the world’s largest exporter of wheat.
It sounds like offshore wind in Denmark is being bid in such a way that the enterprise needs to be priced in such a way that it is actually sufficiently profitable to pay the high cost of grid connection to land, and also give the state at 20% share (for the equivalent of taxes). The headline we read is this one:
https://www.evwind.es/2024/12/06/no-offshore-wind-bids-in-denmark-disappointing-but-sadly-not-surprising/103138
No offshore wind bids in Denmark – disappointing but sadly not surprising
A similar Reuters article says:
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/failed-offshore-auction-highlights-how-denmark-missed-winds-change-2024-12-06/
A major problem is too much electricity produced from wind when it is not needed, resulting in very negative wholesale electricity rates. The article says:
Without a way of using the huge amount of unneeded electricity by these wind turbines (and also today’s higher interest rates), no one wants to bid on this project.
” one potential solution to the problem,”
The problem is the cost of electrolyzers and that stems from the platinum in them.
Any source of carbon (coal or bio) and this excess power can make diesel at a reasonable price. At least back-of-the-envelope calculations look good.
Thank you. I wonder how much carbon and what scale needed to make diesel? References to the biodiesel?
At MREA a company(Israeli) had a fuel cell which they claimed did not use Pt, did use H from a high pressure tank(bottle).
Renewables marginally work and are better than nothing if used onsite in a manner which enables storage and obvious zero transmission losses. Storing as diesel is attractive.
In the near term, we will need something. Farm income looks to have a bumpy near term future. It takes too much capital and there is not much one human can add to that capital. Sitting in an expensive cab doesn’t cut it.
Obviously I like H, non polluting and is totally recyclable.
Ukraine may well mean we are closer to a non renewable resource problem than many would care to admit.
Gail’s graph of industrial production shows a drop which looks like 25% in 2025 or close. That could be interesting.
Dennis L.
“Thank you. I wonder how much carbon and what scale needed to make diesel?
The numbers are 4 MWh and a ton of carbon (coal, charcoal, carbonized stubble) to make a little over 4 bbl (178 gal)of diesel. With current technology, I don’t think it can be scaled down to a farm’s need. The one I cite makes 34,000 bbl/day.
It would be helpful to know the average diesel consumption for a farm and the carbon content of the crop residue.
“biodiesel” is vegetable oil pressed out of peanuts, canola, or some other oil crop and treated so diesel engines run on it. Switching to biodiesel would use up a lot of crop area. I seem to remember that growing feed for horses took up about 20% of farmland but you probably have a more modern number from the Amish.
I think fuel cells don’t require Pt. Electrolysis cells do, though there are lots of people trying to find a substitute.
“industrial production shows a drop which looks like 25% in 2025 or close. That could be interesting”
No kidding. I doubt that will happen, but of course it could. A major nuclear exchange would knock down production that much or more.
Of course, the crop residue is needed for the soil. In fact, you probably need some other supplements to add to the soil, as well (composted human and animal waste, if not too polluted by drugs).
Getting the coal or carbon could be a problem, too.
Crop stubble only seems to be a waste product to us because of fertiliser. Pre industrial societies waste almost nothing.
Keith, does your plan involve forced hydrogenation of biomass?
“forced hydrogenation”
No. It is the reaction that was used to make town gas at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The difference is that the heat to vaporize carbon in steam is provided by excess renewable energy. This makes syngas which can be converted to diesel fuel like is done in Sasol’s Qatar plant at 34,000 bbl/day.
Previous post has a typo, takes 3 MWh, not 4 MWh per ton of carbon.
Over regulation has nearly killed off family farms here in Australia. You have to be niche to make it work nowadays.
The area where I live used to support myriad young families, prior to deregulation of the milk market.
You can debate whether the over regulation is deliberate or not, depending on your preferred conspiracy theories.
I’m wondering if I should start marketing the meat from our cattle independently online. The animals are never vaccinated, never drenched, no pesticides used on the farm.
With Bovea etc they have to be worth more than supermarket meat.
Have to see if I can be bothered. A couple of keen, young, local farmers have started doing that.
One of the most stupid books ever written is John Steinbeck’s The Pearl.
A poor fisherman in some South American town finds a huge pearl, probably the best in many miles.
Not getting a proper price, he, his wife and his child begin a long trek to sell the pearl for a higher price. (Who does that? Is it like an RV travel? No man in that part of world does not take that kind of journey with family!)
People who wanted to steal the Pearl follow them and there is a shootout, where the fisherman’s child gets killed.
At the end the idiot and his even moronic wife dumps the pearl to the sea. They had lost their boat, their only source of income, and now they have no future. What fool does that?
Obviously Steinbeck never really bothered to learn the lifestyles of people in that part of world but I will just say this.
The Pearl was immensely worth more than the child’s life.
The Pearl was immensely worth more than the child’s life.
Life in that part of world was, and is, quite cheap and a child is easily replaceable while that kind of Pearl is not.
Too much hollywood style messages. Families are nothing if they do not bring utility.
-==
As things simplify, those who do not provide utility to the group would simply be abandoned and no one will regret their deaths.
So, while working in Charlotte a co worker named Eddie, real good guy.. volunteered at Hospitals and himself not in good health, had his Sister who was a Nun in South America, Peru for DECADES. Of course, her being a registered nurse and health care provider was much respected and when he visited her there the word was out Eddie was NOT to be harmed.
Eddie also mentioned life for the ordinary villages, those not born in a Hospital and legally registered with birth certificates, were pretty much non existent…and death was not much of a bother for the authorities when it occurred for them.
Suppose the local rule was applied in those cases. Now this was some time ago so things may have changed, for better or worse….
All I know, it’s better here and not there.
Human life is cheap in most places and not that precious
We all pat ourselves on the back for our falling fecundity. Demographers think this solves the “population problem”.
But as resources become more and more dear, human life loses value.
Once upon a time, you had to breed a slave labour force and retirement plan. I fear that time may be returning.
People will figure out that pension plans cannot really be made to work unless there are a lot of young people making good wages. It is always a situation of the young people supporting the retirees, only the situation is sometimes more direct than other times.
Before fossil fuels, most people worked their entire lives. There was no such thing as “retirement.” Work might change, but it was still there.
Pensions are a concept linked to fossil abundance and together they will disappear. Being a Millennial I don’t think I will ever receive a retirement pension, in fact I think that the pension system in Italy where I live, but in general the whole European one, is destined to collapse by 2035 for a simple reason of demographics.
Being a mechanical engineer with an awareness of the importance of cheap fossil energy I knew that sooner or later the party would be over, after all it was also quite logical to come to this conclusion for anyone with a minimum of reasoning.
However, the majority of the population, as well as those of my generation (and the younger ones in particular) are totally devastated by green propaganda. After all I can understand them, peeking into the horrors of the future is not something pleasant.
But at this point I have learned to not worry too much about what the future holds.
Whatever Will Be, Will Be …Que sera, sera
“Being a mechanical engineer”
I am an EE. About a year ago I started looking into a way to make diesel fuel from any carbon source, coal, charcoal, carbonized trash, etc. The idea dates back to making town gas (CO and hydrogen) at the very start of the industrial revolution.
It takes 3 MWh of heat to vaporize a metric ton of carbon in steam using resistance heating from intermittent renewable power. The energy content of the gas is around 15 MWh. You need to store the gas to make the F/T plant work full time. There is such a plant in Qatar that uses CO and hydrogen from reformed natural gas to make 34,000 bbl of synthetic diesel a day. The cost of making synthetic diesel at scale might get down to $20/bbl.
I don’t see any way to profit from this, you can’t patent a 100 plus year old process, but perhaps that just a lack of imagination. In any case, if you want to take this idea and run with it, or even talk it up among other engineers, let me know.
We still need the carbon. I expect that this will be another bottleneck, as I said before.
yes i was wondering about the charcoal source
cut down the trees—reduce them to charcoal—convert the charcoal to oil
i dont pretend to have keiths skill with a calculator—but theres something wrong with his sums there i think
“We still need the carbon”
That’s true. I have not worked out where we could get the carbon, but besides such as crop residues, there is an awful lot in landfills.
The inspiration for this is a way to use intermittent power, something you have made a point about for years. to make diesel, another point of concern.
I’m afraid that is correct. Slavery was abolished not because we, as human species, become “good”. We simply noticed that a “mechanical slave” run by steam, in the first place, was way more effective than a human one.
There is a fantastic video by Jean Marc Jancovici doing the math regarding the amount of physical work that a human can do and the cost associated with it.
Below there is the video, around min 11 is the part that I mentioned.
https://youtu.be/wGt4XwBbCvA?t=655
it is perhaps no coincidence that the end of slavery and the discovery of the first oilwells, in the usa, happened in the same decade
I have a different take on this one. I read this book at a child, and several things stuck with me:
1) It was revealed later, that the pearl was not an ideal colour. It was huge, but also odd in appearance.
2) The family disintegrated over perceived wealth
3) The story was a parable
I had completely forgotten about this story… so it was nice to recall it again by Klum’s post. I remember quite a bit of the book. The diving, the revealing of the pearl, the initial elation, the disappointment, and then the eventual downfall.
I think this may have stuck with me. As a young adult, I thought the pursuit of riches was paramount. But, as a saw people around me achieve that goal, I realized it didnt make anyone any happier…. much like The Pearl.
Today, I think about, and work on, ideas which may operate outside of the current economic system, but utilize today’s technology to find the best way of enjoying life in rural environments. Rural life is almost certainly to suffer from lower energy inputs, and yet, its where I would rather spend the rest of my life.
I wonder if this book may have played a role in my direction of thinking.
I don’t know what version of the story you read, but the ‘fact’ that the pearl was oddly shaped was presented by someone who tried to buy the gem for a much lower prices. The truth is several people did follow the fisherman to steal it, and if it were worthless people would not have risked their lives (all of them being shot by the fishermen) to steal it.
The fact comes to down that Steinbeck tries to force the reader to think that the life of a child is more valuable than the pearl of great price, and in reality the price of the pearl is high while the price of a human life in that part of world is very, very cheap.
Family disintegration is nothing in reality.In a chaotic world families were often formed and broke down easily. Only Hollywood movies promote family value, not much so in the rest of the world.
Interesting that I dont recall any of the child vs riches component of the story. I guess that was the intended important bit.
I thought that the colour had been glossed over from the start, as if the fisherman couldn’t see that what he held was not what he thought it was… and was being unrealistic about the future.
Its been nearly 50 years since I read it. I can see your points in retrospect.
Its complicated
Slain UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s tenure was marked by rocketing profits—and accusations of insider trading and coverage denial
BYSasha Rogelberg
December 5, 2024 at 2:05 PM EST
A group of investigators in suits stand behind yellow crime tape.
…UnitedHealthcare in particular denied coverage for post-acute care, or services and support needed after a hospitalization. In 2019, the insurance provider’s initial denial rate for post-acute care prior authorization requests was 8.7%; by 2022, it had increased to 22.7%.
The recent reports add fuel to the fire of UnitedHealth’s reputation for coverage denial, which forces its customers to pay for more of their medical expenses out of pocket. According to personal finance platform ValuePenguin, UnitedHealthcare denies 32% of claims compared to the industry average of 16%.
….Justice Department was investigating the company for antitrust practices. According to the lawsuit, Thompson was allegedly aware of the investigation and sold 31% of his shares 11 days before the Wall Street Journal reported the probe in February, which sunk the company’s stock by 5%. Thompson allegedly netted $15 million from selling stock.
Thompson’s tenure as CEO of the insurer began April 2021 and marked a period of growth for the company. Under his leadership, profits for UnitedHealthcare surged from $12 billion in 2021, to more than $16 billion in 2023. Thompson received an annual compensation package in 2023 valued at $10.2 million, ranking him among the highest-paid executives at the health care giant.
Speculation on social media has emerged that the insurer’s policies toward its customers could be a motive in the 50-year-old’s death.
What was written on the spent shells?
But, of course, read his was a good guy….very caring and family oriented…yes, indeed
In my memoirs over 5 years ago, I wrote that we would ultimately witness the clash of the titans: Medical Insurers vs Medical Providers. This chaos would eventually lead to the false promise of universal health care, which now looks like it could be yet another off shoot of digital IDs, UBI, CBDCs or a public-private partnership to float and hide debt debased dollars, using US Treasuries as collateral, to buy up stable coins which in turn buy up cryptocurrencies. There is no regulation of these kinds of transfers or markets.
The other approach is simply to hide liabilities off ledger into more FASB-56 accounts which can’t be audited.
More like the battle of the billionaires (the Insurers) vs the millionaires (the providers), with the insurers ultimately winning since they have bigger pockets.
Ultimately, the billionaires have to go down also, some sooner than others. Insurers depend heavily on electricity, for example. Once electricity becomes too intermittent, insurers will do badly. Also, insurers hold many kinds of securities on their balance sheets. They will have difficulty if many of them have problems.
I also wondered with intermittent electricity whether most money goes back to being physical notes and coins and not in digital form as it is now.
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Europes-Industry-Set-to-Suffer-as-Natural-Gas-Prices-Surge.html
Europe’s Industry Set to Suffer as Natural Gas Prices Surge
.
The article points to an OilPrice.com chart.
https://oilprice.com/oil-price-charts/#Natural-Gas
The price for US Henry Hub is 3.0
The price for Dutch Natural Gas is 15.00
Not mentioned in the article is the Japanese import price for LNG 15.13
My two cents: Imported LNG tends to be high-priced because of the high cost of transport. But Europe doesn’t have enough storage, so it is depleting early this year. Also, some pipeline natural gas from Russia has been cut off–the part through Austria.
A further consequence might be in military materiel. Tanks, APC’s, Fighter jets, etc all burn tremendous amounts of fuel. ‘A military moves on its stomach.’ Lt. Col Witt pointed out that the winning military might be the one to replace fossil fuel, land based systems with renewable energy and space based systems.
Given that spacex has landed an intercontinental space vehicle on a moving boat at sea repeatedly, it seems plausible that a space cannon could fire a baseball bat size projectile and hit a tank, jet, missile, etc.
The main requirement would be a very low cost heavy lift capability. Once you had that…
It can never be low cost to put objects into space, physics tells us that and anyone who claims or implies otherwise is lying. There will be no space cannons.
“no space cannons.”
I can’t think of any reason anyone would want to do it, but an M!A! tank could be put in orbit in a StarShip for perhaps a million dollars. That’s maybe 1/4 of what those tanks cost.
That’s absolutely false. You cannot launch a 68 ton object into orbit for a million dollars.
“68 tons”
Maybe not, but Musk talks about 100,000 kg for $10/kg.
Musk’s words are worthless.
I can’t even send a package to Connecticut for $10/kilo.
Consider the cost of a train load of coal.
“During the Roaring Twenties, opinions polarized around no-compromise cultural issues like alcohol, drugs, sex, immigration, and family life. Meanwhile, parents strove to protect a Scout-like generation of children (who, in time, would serve in World War II and be called the “Greatest Generation”).
Sound familiar?
– The Fourth Turning Is Here, Howe (2023)
The 1920s was another low energy per capita time. A few rich farmers with equipment could grow crops much more efficiently than other farmers. This meant that prices fell too low for other farmers. Also, farmers’ helpers lost their jobs. The roaring 20’s were roaring for the group that could enjoy the wealth. The others had increasing problems supporting themselves. The time was not too different from now.
Strange days indeed
John Lennon died in 1980, so these clips were from long ago. Strangely relevant today, too.
TRUMP SAYS : THE WORLD IS GOING A LITTLE BIT CRAZY RIGHT NOW
https://x.com/DeItaone/status/1865423995840901502
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy9DZCFbTDc
Discussion of Syria and involved players like US, Turkey, Israel, etc.
Two very interesting article, first one is recent:
‘The Syria riddle: How it may turn into the First BRICS War’
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/12/04/the-syria-riddle-how-it-may-turn-into-the-first-brics-war/
Second one, appeared during the first Syrian wars, but conditions are still equal on the field now.
‘Israel Secretly Paying Salaries of Syrian Rebels’
Israeli people, Jews in general, must accept some critics, they cannot always hide themselves behind ‘antisemitism’ when they are criticized.
What they are doing will hurt also themselves in the next months/years.
I think that most of them is understanding this.
https://www.newsweek.com/israel-secretly-paying-salaries-syrian-rebels-golan-heights-627155
Elon Musks wet dreams scrutinized by ChatGPT:
Q: Space is basically cold. Stars are heat sources. If the humans want to travel to other stars, the need heated spaceships. That is a lot of energy.
A: You’re absolutely correct: space is an extremely cold environment, with temperatures near absolute zero in most regions. For interstellar travel, maintaining a heated, habitable spaceship would indeed require a significant amount of energy. Let’s break this down further:
Why Space is Cold
Vacuum of Space: There’s no medium like air to transfer heat via convection or conduction. Heat in space is lost mainly through radiation, which is a relatively slow process.
Background Temperature: Space is filled with the cosmic microwave background radiation, which has a temperature of about 2.7 Kelvin (-270.45°C).
Energy Requirements for Heated Spaceships
Human Survival: Humans need a temperature range of about 20-25°C, which requires insulation and active heating systems.
Energy Sources: The spaceship would need a continuous, sustainable energy source for heating, life support, and propulsion.
Potential Solutions for Heating
1. Insulation:
Modern materials, like multi-layer insulation (used on satellites), can significantly reduce heat loss.
Reflective materials can minimize radiative heat loss.
2. Energy Generation:
Nuclear Power: Radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) or small modular reactors could provide consistent heat and electricity.
Fusion Reactors: If developed, fusion could supply abundant energy for both propulsion and heating.
Solar Panels: Close to stars, solar energy is efficient, but this becomes impractical in interstellar space.
3. Heat Recycling:
Waste heat from propulsion systems or other onboard machinery can be redirected to heat the living quarters.
4. Minimizing Heat Loss:
By maintaining an efficient thermal equilibrium and designing energy-efficient systems, the spaceship can reduce the need for additional heating.
The Balance of Energy and Efficiency
Interstellar travel demands an energy-efficient design to limit fuel or resource requirements. Advanced technologies like cryogenic stasis (to reduce the need for heated, habitable spaces) or artificial ecosystems could further mitigate the challenges of maintaining warmth over long durations.
Would you like to explore any of these aspects further?
Space doesn’t sound like a good place to go to, even from this little bit of “insight.”
“Space doesn’t sound”
Sounded good enough for the l5 Society to grow to 10,000 people.
The problems with heat is getting rid of it. Have to radiate about 25 kW per person assuming they are growing food. You can use reflectors to concentrate sunlight out to the far edge of the asteroid belt. There is a detailed and mathematically correct discussion of this in the Rosinante books.
I find the books of Jules Verne more scientifically reliable
“Jules Verne”
I read the Jules Verne books. Did you read the Rosinante books? They were written in the 80s, but hold up better than most SF of today. Part of that is because the author is a technically savvy guy who worked for the National Bureau of Standards and he had help from a number of engineers.
Keith
I try to grant you a degree of credibility—but you make it very difficult.
Verne was merely suggesting time travel (and he wasn’t a freezenik)
Rosinante suggests (or appears to) evacuating ourselves to asteroids–(techically savvy)—lol.
good with a calculator i daresay.—but the human body cannot live in harmony with itself for long without gravity. bad things start to happen—that has been shown time and again.
‘
“without gravity”
You are *completely ignorant* about the design of space colonies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_settlement
https://nss.org/the-colonization-of-space-gerard-k-o-neill-physics-today-1974/
When Dan Jones brought me this issue, he talked about how the magazine’s arrival had shut down the Physics department at the University of Arizona for a day while they checked every detail and found there were no physics errors.
Earth normal gravity is provided by rotating the cylinder. The come in counter rotating pairs to keep them pointed at the sun.
keith
i read most of your link with interest.
your science takes little account of human emotion, of self, of contentment–of needs that cannot be defined.
as with your ai obsession—ai cannot and will not give me verse or music that will cause my eyes to sting—it will not transfix and transport me with the voice of Shakespeare with a beauty that knows no calculation
ai will not bring itself the joy of reproducing itself, or the ballet that lasts for a lifetime of wonderful creative choreography in bringing it about.
because that requires human input that is beyond the scope of your calculator.
even if your cylinders were feasible—inhabitants there, having known earth, would go (literally) insane with the futility of it.—as would your frozen head 500 years from now.
even taking the futility of life here being evident at the moment.
none of you calclculations takes in the joy of life here, even fragile as it seems to be–though they are none the less fascinating.
We have spaceship earth, very, very well engineered.
We will/do need the resources from space, we can begin with our solar system. We need energy from fusion, we need a way to get rid of waste from manufacturing.
We have always been in space, we have our spaceship. It is an engineering project; if the continents are not quite right, a bit of civil engineering moved them for the better.
I am the optimist, fusion is always 30 years away. Could it be fusion only works on a large scale? Shielding is accomplished by placing the source 90+million miles distant with slight burps extending hundreds of thousands of miles above the solar surface are not uncommon. It is challenging reaction in the best of times. It is spaceship earth’s power source. Unless one can make a tin can 93 million miles long, fusion is probably now workable on a spaceship as envisioned. The sun is spaceship earth’s power source, solar will work, in space. Earth only gets 1E-12 of the total solar output and that is a good place for the thermostat.
A “tin” can moving through space is very primitive compared to earth, earth’s engineering is significantly ahead of what we can presently do. Some might even say there is a better engineer looking down and shaking a metaphorical head.
We are going to the stars, we always have been, in an easy chair with a few Cheetos.
Dennis L.
“We have spaceship earth, very, very well engineered. ”
I don’t think that is the right way to describe it. Earth just happened, we evolved to fit it.
Our ancestors had a close brush with extinction though. It looks like their population shrank about a million years ago to under 1300 and stayed that way for a long time.
Fascinating article in Science about this. Not sure I should copy/paste, but if anyone wants it and can’t find on the net, ask.
“fusion is always 30 years away. Could it be fusion only works on a large scale?”
Funny story about this, a fusion researcher as a joke put in a requisition for 10 exp 23 grams of hydrogen (one solar mass) The purchasing agent approved it because not understanding scientific notation, he read it as 23 grams of hydrogen.
hk, earth just evolving is a heck of a lot of coincidences.
Pretty funny regarding H E23 grams.
Dennis L.
“heck of a lot of coincidences”
Absolutely. It’s the reason the Drake equation gives a pessimistic view of there being technological life elsewhere. Of course, the whole thing gets binned if what we see around Tabby’s star is aliens.
No way did “Earth just happen”.
Similarly, no way did you evolve out of the “primordial ooze”.
Look into what has to happen for a cell to spontaneously be created. The maths don’t work.
Read the book Rare Earth, by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee.
https://www.amazon.com/Rare-Earth-Complex-Uncommon-Universe/dp/0387952896/
The there is no chance that a cell would be spontaneously created by chance alone in the timeframe we are considering. There are many other requirements for life.
“No way did “Earth just happen”.”
I have followed the subject for many decades. The standard science line seems good enough for me.
“Similarly, no way did you evolve out of the “primordial ooze”.
Look into what has to happen for a cell to spontaneously be created. The maths don’t work.”
There was an awful lot of time involved. But if you can state how the maths don’t work, I am fine with numbers.
“Close to stars, solar energy is efficient”
looks like the “AI” got this wrong. Solar is not efficient anywhere. Besides….during interstellar travel, you are never close to stars. Pretty stupid comment.
And did you really have to consult Chat whatever for this? Any engineer or scientist could have written this, without making up that solar is efficient “when you are close to a star”
You can’t live on Mars because it has no magnetic field, and the solar radiation would fry your brain. That’s why it’s a dead planet. Musk and his fanboys are aware of this. They argue we could live underground on Mars. Which is really stupid since we could live underground here, or better yet, above ground. And terra forming is even more brainless considering we could obviously, spend those monies and resources to restore our home planet.
youtube has many video of supposed UFO/UAP/funny stuff in the sky. Yesterday the quality was poor and unconvincing. Today mass upgrade in quality and inventiveness. Are none US folks get the same massive push of the UFO psyop?
Whose zooming who?
The humans from other planets are going to invade us, as they have reached their population limits.
MG, back 1967/68 there was a popular Television show called ” “The Invaders” starring the actor Roy Thinnes
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mnah3tn1wJ4&list=PLgeGcX2U-sIGC-m56hMTDsG6GZ8eATTzL&pp=iAQB
The Invaders, alien beings from a dying planet. Their destination: the Earth. Their purpose: to make it their world. David Vincent has seen them. For him, it began one lost night on a lonely country road, looking for a shortcut that he never found. It began with a closed deserted diner, and a man too long without sleep to continue his journey. It began with the landing of a craft from another galaxy. Now David Vincent knows that the Invaders are here, that they have taken human form. Somehow he must convince a disbelieving world that the nightmare has already begun.[6]
Lots of themes in the story plots and I even bought the series DVDs when they came out.
Great introduction in the link above
When I was a child, I was affraid of the aliens, hiding under the bed after reading or watching anything about them.
“Whose zooming who?”
In my misspent youth, high school and early college, a bunch of friends and I flew balloon UFOs, mostly around Tucson. Occupied a fair chunk of the front page of the local paper.
Why? To amaze the locals? For fun? Not enough schoolwork?
Don’t know, but you could make a weak case of it being genetic. Many years later I found that a cousin was doing the same thing the same year with almost the same design in Albuquerque.
Yeah, the old balloon UFO flying gene! You could have got that one from your great great great great great great great great great great great great grandparent, who crossed the lightyears to teach the Earthlings to build Stonehenge and then found that they couldn’t go home.
You need a better humor detector.
Back during the days when I was picketing the cult, they assigned a dude to counter picket me. He was a high level member who knew the Xenu story, I made him physically sick by”remembering” and telling him that *my* thetan (spirit) had injected his with alcohol under the orders of Lord Xenu before it was shipped to Earth and blown up in a volcano. Search for Xenu on Wikipedia for this to make any sense. (And it still won’t except to illustrate how gullible some people are.)
////how gullible some people are.//////
out of the mouths of babes and sucklings—etc etc
At least the liquid nitrogen salesmen have cause for eternal gratitude
The economy needs order. Religions help provide order without a huge energy expenditure on police and other surveillance. In some sense, religions are an efficient way of providing order.
”order” is held by a single word:
“belief”
democracy holds together only so long as the belief that democracy holds ”order” for the majority. (in effect that means keeping them warm and fed)
religion works in the same way.
religion holds order only so long as a majority believes the truth of it.—God provided the bounty of the untouched land of the USA,—er—until it was used up. Now the USA is looking for scapegoats for its own profligacy. Hence the MAGAnuts.
Hence the certainty of disorder when it doesn’t happen. (despite professed religions).
history is littered with disorder and collapse. brought about after prayers have been seen to bring no tangible benefit.
“liquid nitrogen salesmen”
LN2 is a side product of making oxygen for hospitals and welding. Cryonics is a small market.
Cryonics is a hard sell unless you have the science background to understand where technology is going with nanotechnology. Then it is obvious. A high fraction of those signed up are from MIT, Stanford or similar places.
Keith
on this subject i give you the plot of the worst horror story you can imagine
Further imagine, as you wish it to be, that your cryo thing actually works.
fast forward 2-3-4-500 years
there are freezeniks, i am led to believe, who have elected to have just thier heads frozen.
So you are awakened, inside a glass case.—you are ”aware”… yet totally at the whim of others who come to look at you.
They will not let you die, because you are a living experiment.
But then they lose interest—but you are kept alive, and aware.—you can do nothing except think.
eternity in solitary confinement.
you realise that you have nothing except the immediate environment—yet you carry all the emotions you were born with 500 years before.
You ask to be allowed to die—but your request is denied–and you can do nothing about it.
try to imagine a more horrific situation—there isnt one.
not that it will come to that, it will all end in slush
sorry—yet not sorry, for your sake.
I found this interesting. Back in the great depression, the deer population was drastically culled by people in search of food. And there was much less population back then. Imagine how quickly deer would be depleted today, not due to increased human population but also with scoped rifles.
It seems that when push comes to shove, “planting a garden” just ain’t gonna cut it. True, you can get nutrients and vitamins from plants, but in the end, you still need calories. With the animal protein comes the energy dense fat, which also explains why Alaskan Brown/Grizzly bears fishing the Salmon runs would strip off only the fat rich skin to eat and leave the rest of the fish and the muscle.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/mammoths-topped-menu-north-american-190454627.html
Anything bigger than a hedgehog will all be eaten within a couple months of the Crunch.
“eaten”
It will solve the rat problem though. 🙂
Hedgrhogs weigh more than rats
Millions of dogs will also be on the menu.
Cats, too, I expect. Dogs at least can be used for hunting or to alert that an intruder in close.
lol
cats will consumes a lot of meat stock before we can get to it
An excellent book, “One Second After” (William R. Forstchen) covers this moment quite nicely. Exchanging of dogs was a part of the new economy.
When I lived in North Carolina during the financial crisis, the good olde boys country hillbillies type of local natives would say if the stores shut down all they would do would be to out and shoot a deer to eat…yep, and when they ran out of them, the two legged version might taste OK too…
Folks don’t realize how difficult it will be…one thing about it all is how difficult it is to grow food , never mind harvest it before it’s eaten by other hungry critters. In North Carolina the ground is like a hard red clay, lacking organic matter. All the gardeners I spoke with, said it’s lack of fertility was an issue.
Like Gail has pointed out. Without the help of BAU it’s almost impossible to get enough from the land nowadays. I’m resigned to the fact, I’ll starve slowly
Now that I have reached Senior citizen age…
its not the first harvest that will be your problem
its getting to the second
Without fertiliser, if you did make it three years you’d be dead in year 4 for sure.
other folks’ appetites are always the problem
Cold climates seem to encourage meat eating; warm/wet climates provide lots of plant food year around. Inhabitants of warm/wet areas tend to have diets that are skewed toward plant foods, especially if population is high.
yup
the inuit have never been farmers
https://x.com/i/status/1864891672686932436
Russian President Putin says ‘one cannot become truly successful, unless one becomes fully self-sufficient’
Back before international trade and supply lines were as widespread as today, countries used to think in terms of producing goods and services for themselves. Food was especially important. This was the reason for farm support programs.
The sorry case of Typhoid Mary, who was responsible for at least 10 deaths, including the death of an only child of a rich banker, was only possible because of complexities, by some scholars who felt it was worthy to keep alive for studies and by the usual suspects who cried for ‘human rights’.
Knowing what she was capable of, Mary Mallon continued to cook as long as she could, she got herself released from her first quarantine in 1909 , escaped and cooked at a bunch of places and creating an unknown number of deaths, and was only apprehended in 1915 after a typhoid outbreak, responsible by her, killed 2 and made 23 more sick.
Putting her to the electric chair would have been the fitting treatment for her, but again the do-gooders and the scientists intervened and she was given a cottage, which she would never have afforded in her entire life, in an island in the Hudson River to live out her life in relative comfort for someone of her class for 23 more years.
Human rights for people like her did not exist in virtually every other country on earth back then.
USA treated its lower class trygolytes too well, and now it is exploding. I expect the trend to reverse very,very harshly,with people looking like villains in lower budget movies simply gunning down anyone they consider to be a threat.
I doubt whether Typhoid Mary was the cause of those outbreaks. Certainly it was only because the families of wealthy oligarchs were affected that she ever became famous. The family members of wealthy oligarchs tended to live pampered lives that made them so delicate that the slightest breeze could have blown them away. But as always, they blamed the hard-working proletariat for their own failings.
We can’t believe everything we read in the newspapers, especially when they were owned and run by the likes of Randolph Hearst, who milked Mary’s story for all it was worth.
“I doubt whether Typhoid Mary was the cause of those outbreaks.
I don’t. She was not the only one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennie_Barmore
Asymptomatic carrier of typhoid were a serious problem in those days. Even worse for tuberculous. That killed both of my grandmothers.
“Certainly it was only because the families of wealthy oligarchs were affected that she ever became famous. The family members of wealthy oligarchs tended to live pampered lives that made them so delicate that the slightest breeze could have blown them away. ”
That’s just not the case. Being well fed makes the immune system much more robust. Famines were usually followed by epidemics. You can see this in Clark’s work.
In any case she and other asymptomatic carriers deserved the electric chair
Fortunately times have changed and it is easy to treat asymptomatic carriers. Even tuberculous is way down in the high income countries.
This is all very quaint. What does Pfizer deserve then?
Anyone who has farmed or raised an animal tends to have not too much sympathies.
I earlier cited a book by the Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nip_the_Buds,_Shoot_the_Kids
In there, at the end before the unnamed central character is given to escape the town before sunrise, the landowner tells the central character that the latter is to be culled, and farmers know what to cull and what to raise and do not think twice.
The catch? Oe’s father was a landowner, who then was able to afford him to the University of Tokyo, which later led to his Nobel Prize. I am sure Oe’s father told him that story many, many times, and Oe’s first child was born with a heavy brain damage, which made Oe a failure in the family since the family heir would be a good-for-nothing who would bring shame to the family, which led him to write books.
Which is why the British elite before 1914 was so strong, since a lot of them had country estates and continued to keep in touch with such principles, culling the unnecessary.
As simplicity grows and complexities are reduced, such old wisdom will come back with a vengeance, with a V.
The difference between physical culling and financial culling is in fact there’s no difference. The financial culling which we currently seem to be experiencing, is just a leveraged form of public hangings. Bitcoin, for example, just makes the rope a ‘bit’ longer. Until it ‘bites’ of course.
Or should i say ‘byte’. That is where we go etherium. Or DogeCoin. My personal favourite is HountedHollow, the mayor voodoo currency du jour in Haiti.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGIHzhn_toc
Canada to take semi auto guns from Canadians and send them to Ukraine.
Time for an American SMO to the north to free our friends under the NWO dictatorship.
Time for the Canadian backwoodsmeb to pay the price of what they did in 1915
It sounds like Canada is heading in the direction of having the wide differences of beliefs that causes the current political party to be thrown out of power.
The death of the United Healthcare chief will just heighten security on the higher executives.
The movie John Q was about a black man, played by Denzel Washington, takes hostages to try to get his son cured.
He succeeds in the movie, so someone decided to pull the trick in real life.
Brian Brown-Easely, a black ex marine, held people on hostage to collect his $892 disability check.
Long story short, Dennis Ponte, one of the SWAT team member, put Brown-Easely down when according to some the latter was going to release the hostages. Ponte, who looks like a badass white policeman(and ex-marine) who would take no prisoners, had no sympathy whatsoever for Brown-Easely’s fate – for people like Ponte, who got off without anything and expressed that he had absolutely zero regrets about Brown-Easely’s death, typical for men like him.
Today’s world has no place for people like John Q or Brown-Easely. The killer of the United Healthcare CEO will be hunted down and probably killed because they don’t want to make that murderer a public hero of something, and the world will go on as if nothing happened.
The world is for hard assed people who have absolutely zero sympathies for the poor, the unfortunate and the weak. They are to be culled.
The over reaching fat dumb and happy will also be culled.
https://blog.medium.com/the-great-barrington-declaration-and-how-polarized-we-are-f244258b3a7d
The Great Barrington Declaration and how polarized we are
“Scientists now agree we may never reach herd immunity as it was envisioned in 2020 (and in the Declaration) because Covid evolves so quickly. ”
“Most of what I’ve read points to the fact that the GBD was misinformed. But we were all misinformed in 2020, to some degree. We were all trying to figure it out, and there wasn’t a “right” path forward — only a path that would reduce some risks at the expense of others.”
Herd immunity can always be reached by having everyone with a vitamin D level above 40 ng/ml. I do not understand why my milk cows (who supplement) should have levels above 40 and my mother have 21. She is advised by her doctors, as is evidently Keith.
Oil price is reporting:
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Chevron-Cuts-Permian-Capex-for-2025.html
This doesn’t sound good. Chevron is looking to get out of unprofitable drilling, it looks like.
EIA has posted a number for world crude oil production for last August (81.724 mb/d) — this is below their figure for all of 2023 (81.958 mb/d), & their figure for December, 2023 (83.082 mb/d).
With flagging oil prices ( http://oil-price.net/ ), might the world be past post-covid peak oil ( https://davecoop.net/seneca )?
https://www.eia.gov/international/data/world/petroleum-and-other-liquids/monthly-petroleum-and-other-liquids-production?pd=5&p=0000000000000000000000000000000000vg&u=0&f=M&v=mapbubble&a=-&i=none&vo=value&&t=C&g=00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001&l=249-ruvvvvvfvtvnvv1vrvvvvfvvvvvvfvvvou20evvvvvvvvvvnvvvs0008&s=94694400000&e=1722470400000
I hadn’t noticed this yet. Thanks for mentioning it.
An incredible information dense article by Mark Goodwin and Whitney Webb December 2, 2024 – a 32 minute read about the Trump’s control web, AI, Tether, the debt, etc. I will have to go back and reread it just to try to get a minimum overview and understanding.
All wrapped up under the cover of climate change and how AI is going to be useful to humanity etc. Complexity kills whether from the lowly grunt on the battlefield wishing he had a realiable, functional simple to operate AK-47 that doesn’t jam to the ultra technology-energy complex and the false promises of EVs and nuclear power. The geopolitical-financial- military-AI- medical industrial- agricultural complex is attempting to consolidate. And don’t think for one minute that Trump is here to save you.
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2024/12/investigative-reports/howard-lutnick-and-the-commandeering-of-the-department-of-commerce/
China and its economic collapse: vibrant elderly people, lethargic young people and middle-aged people with nothing to live for
https://youtu.be/40G2LBCZmdc?si=NSbXN-hcFgGqkN_Z
I don’t know about that in all honesty. Suppose like everything it depends.
A co worker just visited there and was very impressed by the society.
Claimed saw no homeless, no drug addicts and everyone was friendly and seemed engaging. Had a very nice visit and the prices were very very reasonable. Claimed all transactions were digital. No cash, so I suppose it’s already actually here, we just don’t know it.
Not to say China doesn’t have its challenges and problems, that’s baked n the cake, but who doesn’t? We are on the downslope of the “energy ladder” as Randy Udell (RIP) would term it as..a very difficult place to be.
The undercover reality of China is not so nice. You can become a victim of fraud, as one Slovak man living with his Chinese wife in China says in his recent video:
https://youtu.be/Gy6SUG3pOUQ?si=x1n3fI3jsnJy7-VT
Of course, fraud is very common occurrence here in the United States, especially here in Florida. In the news very regularly and is both large and small scale.
What of it?
I can portray the United States worse than China without any effort…
What is the most popular fraud?
Phishing/Spoofing. …
Fake Check Scams. …
Friendship & Sweetheart Swindles. …
Investments. …
Advance Fee Loans, Credit Arrangers. …
Family / Friend Imposters. …
Computers: Equipment and Software. …
Scholarships/Grants. Offers of fictitious “guaranteed” scholarship or grant funds in exchange for up-front payment or personal information.
When it comes to the states most impacted by fraud and identity theft, Georgia takes the #1 spot. The Peach State had 1,599 reports of fraud and identity theft per 100,000 people in 2022. Coming in at number 2 is Delaware with 1,581 reports, followed by Nevada with 1,516 instances.
I could continue but as I pointed out, the US is no better
I have a friend whose wife lost $16K in a fraud. She was a nurse ans was stupid enough to drive to the bank to facilitate the transfer.
BTW she lived in Texas.
A woman here in Birmingham Alabama just lost $35K.
It happens everywhere.
From DT in “das Gelbe Forum”
Comparison China vs Germany:Small travel report from China 2024 (mT)
DT , Wednesday, 04.12.2024, 03:36 4798 Views edited by DT, Wednesday, 04.12.2024, 03:52
Fortunately, China has lifted its visa requirement for Germans, which still existed in 2023. Due to the clumsiness of our chatterbox, you had to travel to Frankfurt for a trip to China in 2023 and apply for a visa in person after standing in a very professionally managed queue (unlike foreigners at the American consulate in Frankfurt, where arbitrary humiliation is the order of the day). In the visa application you had to provide all the telephone numbers of all employers (even those who had died), including your parents’ occupation, dates, etc.
It felt like you wanted to immigrate to China and not just spend a few days doing business and selling high-tech products made in Germany. Anyway, that has now been overturned and since the beginning of the year you can just go there and stay for 15 days without a visa. When I asked, I was told that the method used last year was “revenge” for how Chinese people were treated in the USA and then, unfortunately, under Lenchen (or should we say “under Jennifer”) in Germany.
Anyway, I was there three times and was deeply impressed. Since 2019, before Corona, the country has changed completely again. Back then, thousands of Audis, BMWs, Mercedes and VWs drove around on the streets and the air above the cities was often thick and stuffy, but this year I’ve seen practically only blue skies (when it hasn’t rained) and almost only Chinese models, including the odd Tesla. I noticed this especially in Guangzhou. There, in front of the finer hotels, which still cost well under 100 EUR a night, there were almost only BYD and other brands that I don’t know.
The old yellow-green taxis that you usually drove and that looked like a VW Santana are almost non-existent. Instead, there are all the new Chinese brands, and practically all of them are electric vehicles. Interesting: inside, they look more like an Audi or Mercedes, with buttons, levers, even an automatic gear lever, and a large display, but they often have their smartphone attached to it with a holder on which the equivalent of Google Maps runs (a kind of Alibaba Maps). I have the app too, symbolized by a paper airplane, but I can’t read the Chinese. But it’s enough to find your hotel, locate your location, and find the subway if you’re traveling alone in the city. With a Chinese e-SIM, that’s no problem, and Google Translate translates all Chinese labels by simply taking a photo and clicking on it. Then you can even find your way around remote bus stops.
My contacts there also picked me up personally or drove me to the airport and when I looked at the car (electric, of course) and asked them about it, they said they liked the fact that it wasn’t so radically different to a Tesla, where there isn’t even a steering wheel lever for forward and reverse, just a slider on the display, but that it feels like a normal car, but it’s electric! Clever!
The models all look very stylish, a bit like the Volvo Polestar (Volvo is now part of Geely in China). When I asked about the price for a car that is about the size of a Polestar, my contact told me it would be between 25,000 and 35,000 EUR. Wow!
And now comes the bombshell: the salary at companies in the high-tech sector like Huawei for graduates with a doctorate in computer science, electrical engineering or microelectronics, for example, is currently 100,000 euros a year!!! You have to let that sink in. As far as I know, you don’t even get that at Siemens or Huawei Germany. Maybe Google in Munich pays that much for AI computer scientists to start with, but as far as I know, the German car industry doesn’t pay anything like that for computer scientists straight after their doctorate.
Apartments are available for around 300-500 kEUR for 100-150 m² in the usual residential towers. What I have noticed, however, in all the cities I have been to, is that many residential tower projects (typically we are talking about 100-150 m high towers with box-shaped apartments, of which 20-40 towers stand next to each other) have actually come to a standstill. You can see that they are only built from concrete, the glass is missing. Or there is a forest of cranes next to them, but they are completely idle. You could easily transport and accommodate a large proportion of our “skilled workers” there, there is so much empty space.
What struck me, and is extremely important, is how far ahead China is with its R&D efforts. One million engineers graduate from universities every year, and the universities are equipped with state-of-the-art technology. The amount of high-tech that you see everywhere, in a wide variety of sectors, is breathtaking, and I think that the Americans are currently making the biggest mistake of all by not allowing Chinese people into the country to visit their trade fairs and conferences, because that way the Americans don’t get to know how far the Chinese have come. Conversely, only a few Americans come to China anymore; they boycott the country as much as possible, and that is the biggest mistake in my eyes, because they don’t see what is going on there.
After my visits, especially in Guangzhou, I thought I had landed in the 22nd century. Standing on a street corner waiting for the traffic light to turn green, I thought, you can’t hear anything at all, and then the traffic rushes past you and on the small parallel streets for bicycles and mopeds that run alongside the main roads, you hear NOTHING. This is particularly tricky with the e-scooters, because they roll up at 25 km/h and are very close to you at the traffic lights and you don’t notice anything. They often have batteries that you can exchange in small shops (like Seven Eleven). Empty for full. There are also charging stations everywhere where you can put your batteries in. You pay with WeChatPay or AliPay with your cell phone, but you can still get by with cash, even at the payment machines in the subway stations.
Joe68 asked where all the electric cars are charged. Since I spend more time at hotels, I obviously see charging stations everywhere. But when you drive through the city, there are also large parking lots with dozens of stations, like Tesla charging stations here. I don’t know whether there are charging stations in all the high-rise forests down in the underground car parks. What I do know, however, is that the Chinese have installed hundreds (!) of GW of solar and wind power plants in recent years. 1 GW is like a block of a nuclear power plant, except that it doesn’t run all the time. But that has helped to change the power supply, shut down some of the inner-city and dirtiest coal-fired power plants, and significantly improve the air quality. The fact that only 40% of cars are combustion engines (at least in Guangzhou, further west in the “hinterland” the rate is not quite as high) also helps.
If you look out of your hotel room on a Sunday morning at 7:30 a.m., you can see the crane on the neighboring high-rise construction site already turning, ants scurrying around, and you can see the flashes of the welding machine on the 50th floor. Sunday morning, mind you! Saturdays are of course business from morning to night, even in high-tech companies. Meetings scheduled on Saturday mornings are a matter of course.
If our lazy pensioners from the 1968 era go into “partial retirement” at the age of 60 after only 21 years of “work” and then become professional holidaymakers and burden the pension system, compare that with the Chinese. Even with a full-time worker who works 42 or 44 hours a week for us, a Chinese person works 40% more (7 days instead of 5). I didn’t ask about the holiday regulations.
The children are given a lot of pressure at school and have to do STEM homework diligently until late in the evening, a lot of math, but also a lot of languages, and their English pronunciation has improved a lot in recent years, thanks to DuoLingo.
Almost everyone uses VPNs and therefore has Google and western media. In many places, however, you can still get western internet, and hotels often have Google.
If you walk through the city, on a Saturday night, for example, you will see tens of thousands of people out and about. Some are out eating or going out, but there are also people in the poorer areas sewing shirts and labels on polo shirts. There are always e-mopeds driving around, sometimes with a box on the back or a trailer attached, transporting goods back and forth. Even after midnight, you can see people sitting at their sewing machines in sweat shops. And of course, business goes on around the clock, like in a giant anthill.
Not for a second did you feel unsafe, threatened or uneasy, which is everyday life in certain areas of NY, San Francisco or Los Angeles, or at the train stations in Cologne, Stuttgart, that shithole Berlin of course, or Duisburg, Hamburg, etc.
The Chinese themselves are extremely well dressed, especially the ladies. They still place value on appearance and are well-groomed. You won’t find the kind of smelly, scruffy or badly shaven old 68ers or skilled workers that you see in abundance in our subways or on the city streets. I’ve already said in the past that they are all on time to the minute or second and are sparkling clean because hundreds of hard-working ants run around the room sweeping up the barely existent dirt and dust, wiping and washing and making everything sparkling clean, even the outside of the ICE trains after every journey, while our trains are dirty as if they had been travelling through southern Europe for three months straight without being cleaned, the subway stations are sparkling clean, you could practically eat off the floor, and nothing has changed in that regard. How easy it would be to give our “professionals” mops, cleaning rags and vacuum cleaners and have them clean the public spaces where they like to hang out anyway as a price for being fed and pampered like royalty. When you come back to Frankfurt and see the unbelievably dirty long-distance train station at the airport, you just want to shove Grube, Pofalla and Lutz’s heads in the dirt.
How can it be that the entrance portal to Germany has not seen the many windows in the glass hall on the platforms cleaned for years or decades? Why is this not planned? Why is the floor from the platforms up to the squaire so dirty, as if thousands of people had spit their chewing gum on it? Why are the escalators, the sides and handles not cleaned constantly? On the outbound flight to Istanbul airport, I saw an escalator that was not working, or more precisely a conveyor belt that was not working. A technician was there at 1:00 a.m. (1 hour after midnight) to fix it. What about all the technicians and engineers that Erika flew in? Why do Thyssen elevators work everywhere in the world, JUST NOT HERE??? That can’t be true! There are so many broken escalators, elevators etc. here, even at Frankfurt airport, where practically everyone has a suitcase, it can’t be right! Fraport, hello??? Have you ever walked through your hall? Have you ever been to Istanbul, Singapore, China and compared them? Are you no longer able to get anything done and can no longer even fulfil your primary task of getting people from A to B?
When I spoke to the people there in China, I only experienced positive thinking, a forward-looking attitude, the awareness of “we can do something, we can achieve something, we are building a better world” and the awareness of showing the hated Americans who are plundering the world and enriching themselves at the expense of other countries. One day they will no longer be needed and semiconductor production will also be able to stand on its own two feet. What is currently happening there in the area of AI and intelligent chips leaves you speechless. And what impressed me most: the average engineer can of course use Python, Java, Matlab etc., there is no messing around, everything is automated. You can quickly install an Arduino or a Raspberry for control and automation, and you can quickly program – practically ANYONE can do that!
And what about the Chinese not being creative? The high-tech I have seen has taken my breath away. AI is used practically everywhere in evaluating and analyzing measurement data, and there is a lot going on in image recognition, for example in the medical technology sector. The number of patent applications from China continues to rise rapidly and, as far as I can tell, the Chinese are also at the forefront in the scientific sector. It’s no wonder, given the high-tech investments from all over the world. There is endless money for it and when something is needed, it is simply bought while it is still possible!
In comparison, Singapore, where I went next and which was my favorite so far, is almost a bit old-fashioned. You notice the many combustion engines, and after being in China, you wonder what an Aston Martin or a Maserati is doing on the road. Because one of my contacts told me when I asked about Porsche: “You know, we don’t need the muscle cars with the big acceleration anymore, our electric cars can do that as well.”
When you get back to Germany, you’re just frustrated. Dirty, broken train stations with all the profiteers, non-functioning, dirty and unpunctual trains, getting from A to B is a gamble, etc., etc. Frustration without end!
And the guilty parties are known and named, but nobody wants to hold them accountable, and the fish stinks most from the head.
Now I’m in Australia and I see that the country is still buzzing and skyscrapers are still being built everywhere. People are doing well, they’re living it up and enjoying the good life. Compared to China, the rattling combustion engines, often with flap exhausts, the SUVs and the outdoor all-roaders are almost anachronistic. But fear is already spreading, at least on television, because there’s nothing Australians fear more than that Trump will impose a raw materials blockade on them and they’ll no longer be able to deliver their hundreds of ships full of coal, ores and minerals to China. The first signs of a raw materials trade war are already being heard, with China not wanting to supply the Americans with antimony, gallium and germanium… then things will get very bleak here, because Australia has no significant industry, and in addition to the mining sector and tourism (also with many Asians and especially Chinese), they make money from rich Chinese who want to take advantage of the “education industry” and populate the universities and bring huge tuition fees into the country, as well as buying up all the newly built apartments in the high-rises and thus keeping the construction industry going. If all of that goes away, things will look very bleak here.
DT
DT , thanks . My brother ( based in India) was at the AutoMechinca in Shanghai and confirms everything you have enumerated . I have also been following the posts by Matt Mushalik and the Adani saga both being Australia based . I have NZ high on the list of collapse ( Fast Eddy and Wet in the beak) will confirm that but you are correct about the Aussie situation . Just a bit better . All oil products are now imported and China rules the South China Sea . Forget USA , they cannot even control the Red Sea leave the ocean . Skating on thin ice . Now let’s get back to China . Here on the blog know the Chinese success was/is built on cheap coal . They are past ”peak coal ” and the world is past ” peak oil ” . How will the current events in the ME effect the supply of a continuous supply of 10/11 mbpd per day ? While I admire what China has achieved , the question is can it be sustained in an energy negative environment ? China has an additional problem which is 1.4 billion to feed . Climate change is a reality and it effects food production . If India and China get into a problem simultaneously the 2.7 billion will be an issue ” too big to handle ” . India is already down the way and is undergoing ” mini collapses ” in about 25 % of the country . Something interesting — the largest employment generation in India has now become ” driver” of e – rickshaw — yes . larger than the IT sector . Tks once again .
P.S ; When does Australia receive the submarines and F-35 for which the govt paid $ 40 billion upfront ? |Answer –never . Scott Morrison warned about this .
This is a very good video, supporting my statement that the Chinese economy is doing very poorly. The decline in housing prices is causing a huge problem, among other things. Old people are doing OK, but younger people are doing less well. It is easy for the youngest ones to give up completely. New marriages are way down. The speaker says that reported GDP growth was over-estimated by three points a year, since the pandemic.
Recently, there is belt tightening going on. People are cutting back on their purchases. There is an oversupply problem of many things, leading to price drops and some sellers losing money.
We are going back (?!) to the moon! Yay!
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/nasa-delays-artemis-moon-missions-until-2026-and-2027
It doesn’t sound to me as if there are any plans to actually land on the moon:
Since 2018 the Serena conditions apply for female astronauts so as to minimize problems in the ISS. Read this for a good laugh
https://www.unz.com/ishamir/toilet-wars/
Entertaining read.
And in one year from now you will read the same article stating that the date has been postponed again, and again, and again.
The reason is Starship. The vehicle is not ready yet and also needs to be human-rated, good luck with that and hoping for a moon landing by 2027.
Btw Starship is an horrible choise for a lander. It was primarily designed for Mars and has few beyond LEO capabilities, basically. The Isp of the engines is worse than a hydrolox counterpart.
To launch a mission on the moon Starship needs between 8 and 12 (some Nasa scientists stated even more) other launches from a cargo ship in order to fill up the tanks and you still have the boiloff problem.
Ahhh the good old-fashioned hypergolic fuels fired in a pressure-feed engine… nastier but more reliable.
The flyby will probably happen, Orion is working, SLS has also been launched.
The problem relies on Starship and in the architecture itself that allows the spacecraft to operate.
One good thing about Musk’s entry to the government is that I do not have to see the mantra of ‘starship orbits’ when it does not.
Part of the collapse is that these delays happen and happen, until the original project is either cancelled or downsized in scope significantly, just so they can save face.
We will see more and more cancellations of offshore (and onshore) wind energy projects. Rollbacks of science space missions (already in full swing) and cancellation of pricey projects like the bullet train to nowhere in California. We will not go to Mars more than one time (if that).
We are currently still funding war though….it seems to slip through although I think we will see the collapse happening there in states moving more to hybrid war, color revolutions, insurgencies, blowing up undersea pipelines and what not.
Europe is on the verge of full collapse. The next 5 years will be interesting.
If these Syria developments allows a pipeline from Qatar, that could be a temporary solution, although it will take a few years before it could be put in place and perhaps that is too long to prevent turmoil in Europe.
Alice Friedmann on the US grid .
https://energyskeptic.com/2024/building-a-national-grid-in-america/
I wrote about the huge problems of the electric grid, years ago, when I wrote at TheOilDrum.com, even before expanding all of the renewables was a consideration.
This is an article from 2008.
http://theoildrum.com/node/3934
The U. S. Electric Grid: Will It Be Our Undoing?
It starts out talking many people thinking about adding more electricity consumption, if fossil fuel consumption is faltering. Then it says:
This is an article from 2010.
http://theoildrum.com/node/6817
The US Electric Grid: Will it be Our Undoing? – Revisited
In the introduction, this article says:
This chart from Alice Friedmann’s pos shows where wind and solar resources for the US are concentrated.
https://energyskeptic.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Smil-americas-high-voltage-transmission-problem.jpg
Evidently, she has copied it from Vaclav Smil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity_transmission_in_China
Will AI infiltrate oil industry and increase oil production for decades? I wonder … there is that maybe better discovery tools. Not sure how it would be used
Sam , no . Even if it was to discover some oil it would be no more than a puddle and uneconomical to bring to the market . Exploration techniques have honed faster than extraction and seismic survey has now mapped virtually the whole planet . The law of diminishing returns applies to AI also .
Romanian Elections Targeted By ‘Aggressive Hybrid Russian Action,’ Declassified Documents Show
https://www.rferl.org/a/romania-russia-election-interference-tiktok/33227010.html
Romanian court annuls result of presidential election first round
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4x2epppego
Is this the result of not liking the outcome, so throwing out the election?
It is amazing how we are “defending democracy in Ukraine” (where there is presently no democracy) yet we throw out results of real democracy when they are not the acceptable result to the neoliberal west.
Argentina’s Milei is the poster child for the financial institutions . Is he just ” old wine in new bottle” ? Long read but incisive .
https://rogerboyd.substack.com/p/argentina-milei-does-a-menem?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=571129&post_id=152201107&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=26quge&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Unless there is a land reform in Argentine every leader there will be like the old one
Argentine and most Latin American countries still use the old system used in Spain and Portugal in the 16th century
This post incorporates five videos. Four of the five are relatively short. The first one is nearly two hours long.
The thing that I think about with Argentina is that fact that it was at one point an oil exporter. This allowed some measure of overshoot, followed by collapse, as prices fell, and as Argentina’s production collapsed.
Now Argentina is trying to ramp up production from shale, but its low price margin (relative to cost) doesn’t seem to be having the same beneficial effect.
These things are going on at the same time the things outlined in the post are going on.
The Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico accuses the journalists that they are responsible for the decrease in consumption in Slovakia
https://www.postoj.sk/166785/vytvorili-ste-taku-atmosferu-ze-na-slovensku-klesla-spotreba-sposobujete-hospodarske-skody
Any excuse is a good excuse. Certainly not the low world-wide supply of oil.
My wife and I have an ongoing joke. Whenever an excuse is needed she says she blames “global warming” and I say I blame “the democrats”.
We have a saying when it’s time to take a dump “I need to go talk to my congressman!” They are all republicans!Same ole sh$t. When I was a kid used to believe…I’m older than that now!
That being said I’m really glad of the political outcome least I don’t have to hear all the woke bull shit