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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.
All are bankrupt . Without subsidies they would die .
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/U.-Companies-Receiving-the-Most.jpg?itok=8l9UEQuo
How come the fossil fuels industry isn’t listed?
Fossil Fuel Subsidies Surged to Record $7 Trillion
Scaling back subsidies would reduce air pollution, generate revenue, and make a major contribution to slowing climate change
Simon Black, Ian Parry, Nate Vernon-Lin
August 24, 2023 https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel-subsidies-surged-to-record-7-trillion
As the Chart of the Week shows, fossil-fuel subsidies rose by $2 trillion over the past two years as explicit subsidies (undercharging for supply costs) more than doubled to $1.3 trillion. That’s according to our new paper, which provides updated estimates across 170 countries of explicit and implicit subsidies (undercharging for environmental costs and forgone consumption taxes). Download detailed data for different countries and fuels here.
….The U.S. federal and state governments give the fossil fuel industry over $20.5 billion in support each year through the tax code, inadequate royalty rates, and direct funding. Big fossil fuel companies claimed $8.2 billion in 2020 from the CARES Act pandemic relief bill.
This sounds like propaganda put out by the World Economic Forum and other European organizations, trying to justify their push toward renewable energy. It sounds like Biden and Harris propaganda.
IMF material is mostly about OPEC+ countries. It is about poor countries that are oil exporters rebating part of the tax that would be paid to the central government back to the poor citizens. Oil prices have been so low in recent years that this practice has mostly disappears because central governments are desperate for the tax revenue. It has essentially nothing to do with the US.
All kinds of nonsensical “environmental costs” can be figured out, and charged for. We don’t have any option besides fossil fuels that works, so what is the point. Nuclear might be an option that works, but wind and solar tend to drive out nuclear, with their crazy pricing scheme. The NRG Energy that receives a subsidy includes some nuclear power plants. Some of the others might, too.
Oil prices were distorted very low in 2020. If any organization should get bail out funds from 2020, it should be the oil and gas companies. Coal prices were no doubt very low, then, too.
I saw this article too, and looked up the energy companies receiving the bailouts.
The first two on the list are Cheniere Energy ($5.6B) and Venture Global LNG ($4.3 B). Both of these are LNG export companies. If US natural gas production is hitting a limit right now, I expect the long term prospects of these companies is not good.
The next three companies are electricity conglomerates. Sempra Energy is headquartered in San Diego; Next Era Energy is headquartered in Texas. Next Era Energy is headquartered in Florida.
The last one is Sasol, which is a coal-based energy and chemical company in South Africa. I imagine the US interest is in its coal to liquid processes and related processes. It also sells electricity. It is reported to have operations in 33 countries.
The list doesn’t include PG&E of Oakland, California, perhaps because of the recent timing. It recently received a $15 billion low-interest loan (which they likely cannot pay back). This is an investor-owned electricity utility. It started out requesting $30 billion loan. https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5044292-biden-loan-guarantee-pge/
The layering of fiat upon fiat. An interesting article. China with its surplus of dollars is issuing its own bonds denominated in US dollars, not yuan, thereby competing against primary and secondary dealers bidding on US Treasury instruments at the US T auctions at the short end of those maturities.
Yet the US Treasuries can also be used as collateral to buy stable coins like Tether so that Tether in turn can buy up more BTC. In other words, the BTC -Stable coin arrangement is a sewer system designed to flush the toxic US Dollar treasury debt build up without the FED having to overtly monetize it.
Wait as minute. So on one hand China and Saudi Arabia are using dollars to compete with the US by selling their bonds denominated in dollars while the US flushes its Treasury debt through collateralizing the purchase of stablecoins which are in turn being used to buy BTC.
With the use of off balance accounting gimmicks kike FASB56 and the outrageous reporting of the government statistics, the BS is off the charts.
https://internationalman.com/articles/heres-what-china-is-doing-to-usurp-the-us-dollar/
This is indeed a very interesting article.
I had never realized that stable coins are backed by short term US debt. According to the article, “Tether now holds more US Treasury bonds than Germany, Australia, and UAE.”
This article also talks about China issuing debt in US$ at essentially the same interest rate as the US government gets.
The article goes on to describe how China could become the intermediary, using US$ debt.
The AI as the supreme inteligence discovers that the economy is no longer profitable, so the AI will shut it down.
Common sense of human leaders would shut down unprofitable sectors of the economy. There is enough natural variability that it is hard to believe all parts of the economy would be unprofitable at the same time.
Ashkenazi Jews
A very interesting study from genomic and hystorical point of views.
It is very interesting to learn from this study that the first original groups of Ashkenazi Jews came from the north east of Anatolia (modern Turkey) and they developed their villages there in order to trade along The Silk Road.
Later they also moved to the region of the Khazar Empire to expand their trade business.
As we know, in that kingdom there were also many Religious conversions in favour of Jewish Religion.
This is a delicate argument for Jews in general because it opens a problem about ‘the law of return to Israel’, since many of them have no ancestral relation with modern Israel-Palestine.
From my point of view, I’m only interested for the hystorical explanation and also for the hystory of trade to which Jews gave great contribute to.
I find this argument very interesting and I don’t want to open any discussion or controversy about it.
https://theconversation.com/uncovering-ancient-ashkenaz-the-birthplace-of-yiddish-speakers-58355
I have never known much about the Yiddish language and the Ashkenazi Jews. The ideas provided in the article seem to fit together.
Regarding Yiddish, the article says:
The technique used in this article is described as follows:
The article shows a map of Turkey, with the comment,
Inside the very nice book written in year 1.200 AD by Ibn Battuta whose title is ‘Travels’, it is written that in that area were also present merchants from Genoa and various Arabs and Asia places, in addition to – of course – Jews.
In Crimea peninsula (on the other side of the Black sea where the Ashkenazi indicated in the article lived), inside an important port, there were different districts: Genoans, Jews, Arabs, all merchants of the Silk Road.
And I’ve also read on Haaretz that in an archeological site close to Jerusalem they found portion of clothes from year 700/800 AD of cotton crossed with silk, manufactured in the area but with silk coming from India and China.
Therefore, the story of trade shows connections which we normally don’t think about.
https://www.amazon.com/Travels-Ibn-Battutah/dp/0330418793
https://www.heritagedaily.com/2023/01/material-evidence-of-silk-road-found-in-israel/145967
Trade has gone on for a very long time.
When Abraham left Ur of the Chaldeans, there seems to have been a lot of trade going on, and Ur was a part of it.
https://truthonlybible.com/2015/02/13/ur-of-the-chaldees-abrahams-original-home/
When Jesus was born in Bethlehem, one account has Wise Men from the East bringing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
Zelensky in power
Laughing and joking Zelensky’s presidential mandate has expired in May and we are in December now.
He has also excluded new elections….(?)
https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/05/16/volodymyr-zelenskys-five-year-term-ends-on-may-20th
A person would think that the lack of elections would be a problem.
It’s at very least a bit cheeky to hold on to power, when the people who elected you, want you not to.
Drones on US
My first impression about this Theatre about drones on the US skies is that the purpouse was to put in place new rules for drones in the Country.
This is a first step:
“The Federal Aviation Administration plans to temporarily bar drone flights over critical infrastructure locations in New York in the face of widespread public concern, the state’s governor said late Thursday.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul said in a statement she had spoken to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas who told her “the FAA plans to grant temporary flight restrictions over some of New York’s critical infrastructure sites — this action is purely precautionary; there are no threat to these sites.”
https://english.alarabiya.net/News/world/2024/12/20/faa-to-ban-drones-over-critical-infrastructure-sites-in-new-york-governor-
Chicago Police want more drones, billionaire Crown family may foot the bill
https://www.noirnews.org/p/chicago-police-drones-crown-family
There seem to be a lot of fairly affordable drones for sale online.
https://www.consumerpicks.org/best-drones?msclkid=27e3f283bbb61921b95f95e639ef396a
New Costco store will limit purchases on Sunday to “only essential items”
“A NEW Costco will follow certain restrictions due to a city’s centuries-old laws.
Customers will have limited access to some items on Sundays
https://www.the-sun.com/money/12305661/shoppers-new-costco-sacred-law/
Sunday “Blue Laws” were common, not too many years ago. The decline in Sunday church attendance has taken place at the same time that Blue Laws disappeared and activities such as youth sports started taking place on Sundays. The article says that this county in New Jersey retains an old Blue Law.
We can imagine a world with six million human members of the owning class, six million ASI members of the owning class. The owning class owns the land and seas of planet Earth and the worker robots and factories, mines, farms, ships. Dirigible are the preferred mode of bulk land transport. Light land transport is by four wheel cars and trucks on roads of two tracks each two feet wide. Weight limit one ton.
There are about fifty million worker robots on planet Earth. There are currently ten million worker robots on the moon and twenty million on Mars. There are a few million worker robots in the asteroid belt.
The long haul ships with ASI and worker robots are on the way to the twenty nearest solar systems. They will arrive in one to five thousand years.
The human population is limited to six million and the ASI population is limited to six million human equivalent load. The worker robot population is limited to fifty million. The solar worker robot population is limited to two hundred million.
We are beginning to map the Ort Cloud.
you sound like Keiths stunt double
That is the way to go.
In the book of Jasher, compiled by the most renowned rabbis of 15th and 16th century , it is said that the long-living people of pre-flood era numbered no more than 670,000, since there was little reason to reproduce.
Six million is too many but reasonable. If there are too many elites things go over a bunch of directions. Limiting their numbers will help.
Good news, we’ll have working fusion by early 2030’s … apparently …
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/virginia-will-be-home-worlds-first-nuclear-fusion-power-plant
Woah. I have to visit Vegas and place all my money on it not happening next time I visit. Problem is it will take 6 years to cash it.
Each year, the Economist publishes a cover near the beginning the year, foretelling what the powers that be think might be ahead. This year, the cover seems to suggest that the year of 2025 will be a troubled year.
https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/a-year-of-chaos-does-a-shocking-magazine-cover-reveal-what-the-global-elite-have-planned-for-2025/
The image on the front this year is quite dark. It has many sub images, with Trump in the center. There are other world leaders shown. Also strange images, such as a syringe filled with red liquid, a missile, a mushroom cloud, and a red fist.
This is a link to the front cover.
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Snip20241217_71.png
The planet Saturn is shown. According to google, Saturn can represent “god of Harvest or Time of Reaping”
In other words they know that year is bye bye bau due to no oil back in 2005 Daniel estulin confirmed this so get ready for the the roller-coaster
See the city-wide blackout at the top?
Surely, at some point the editors of The Economist would have got wind of their end-of-year cover being interpreted by so many, and now they enjoy playing around with people’s expectations.
Read who owns it, and then draw together the other agendas. (eg: 2030) It especially makes sense if you look backwards to previous covers.
Rather than have a work force drive to a factory every day it would be a great simplification to have the worker live at the factory. With robot workers this is possible. The same for every work location schools, hospitals, government, etc.
Without the need to pay a living wage labor will be far cheaper.
When I visited the slums of Mumbai, the tour guide told us that many of the workers slept on the floor of the factory at night. They wanted to send home as much money as possible to their families, who lived on farms in rural areas.
So I am afraid living at the factory has already been thought of.
i keep trying to tell folks
robots dont consume
and if nobody consumes
the consumer economy ist kaput
and us with it
the implicit assumptions in this and the other comment are nonsense
Yes! The owning class does not need the consumers.
lol—ed and ivan
the value of anything you own is dependent on what someone else will pay for it
you own several mansions, a private jet and a yacht.
without ”consumers” the necessary ”energy capital” to sustain the value of those assets ceases to be.
none of your rich chums has any capital either….so you cannot sell anything to them .
you have a stash of gold bricks—unfortunately no one is buying gold.
if no one is buying your gold, and you cant eat it, you might as well build a chicken coop with it, oh—and use your Rembrant as a waterprrof roof covering for it.
Like i said, without us playing pass the parcel, Bezos becomes a pauper.
beyond the following, i’m not going to engage. the discussion is too dumb.
if i own the food and the land and the technology and production facilities and can enforce the hierarchy (via social position and norms and organized violence), i can invent my own money, i am autonomous, i don’t need some peasant worker to be able to pay me – i tell them what to do and they do it if they don’t want to starve.
I would say the robots do pay the owner with labor and finished goods. The peasants should no longer exist as they are just polluters that give no value to the owning class.
”finished goods” must be produced from raw materials—ok—robots can in theory anyway– produce raw materials
they deliver ”finished goods” to the ”owning class”
then what?
a new car every month—a new tv every week.??
fascinating thread of discussion— that people actually believe that robots can deliver infinete prosperity.
everyone is a billionaire—those who are not are disposed of—-hilarious, a Musk dreamworld.
the wealth of the billionaire depends on the support structure of everyone else.
sure, that also works
I think a good analogy is the show Gilligans Island. Thurston Howe is a rich man and tries to leed a rich person life as a castaway. It is silly show but so it’s this idea of elites in a collapse situation
ive been trying to drive home that point for years
yet the certainty persists that the ”rich elite” can exist in isolation.
our global system just doesnt function like that.
if you are ostentatiously wealthy—you have to pay people to guard you and yours.
sooner or later the system implodes.—history proves it time and again
Maybe a different economy is coming. Could be better.
Dennis L.
you cannot have an economic system unless one energy form is exchanged for another.
you can exchange 2 sheep for a cow, or trade your wife for a horse.—its a trade of energy and the value you put on that energy.
thats why money is nothing more than a unit of energy exchange—its what an ”economic system” is.
the alternative is hunter gathering (ie no money)
there is no ‘other way’.
Ed; hunting reality will make you cheese on a squirel sandwich. By the time you spit the hair, you will choke in the tail. The greed sector tail risk section nr 18
CEO killer ‘copycat’ grins in eerie mug shot after he ‘stabbed company president’ in meeting
https://www.the-sun.com/news/13128199/erik-denslow-anderson-express-nathan-mahoney-ceo-stabbed/?utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=sunustwitter&utm_source=Twitter
If one person starts the trend, other unhappy people may follow.
You are also talking about a small to medium sized farm.
Dennis L.
Simplification means the living styles of today’s ‘working class’ will be significantly, for the lack of a better term, abridged.
Working class lives are, I have to say, disposable.
The days when people who do matter treated those who were treated as humans just because they had two legs are ending as reality hits the curb, as the days of mercy and bounty for the poor, the unintelligent and the disenfranchised are ending.
A world ruled by faceless bureaucrats, who might not even be human since such jobs are more efficiently done by nonhumans, where the working class have no more freedom than maybe turn their heads around is just around the corner as the world returns to normalcy after a century of madness.
hate to dissillusion you kulm
but the $billions of the wealthy elite is entirely dependent on the day to day working of peasants such as we.
it is possible that the likes of musk do not realise that—but it is so.
easy to figure—-imagine Bezos’s parcel sheds.
they exist because we peasants play pass the parcel on his behalf.
remove ”us” and use robots—in fact, dispose of us altogether and use robots for everything.—great, no need to feed ”us” at all—a few thousand super wealthy have to world as their playground.
big problem
robots do not participate in our economic system, they consume energy, but do not involve themselves in ”commerce”.
oops.
The robots running Bezos’s sheds just run around picking up parcels, but no one wants them—because no one is around to buy them—robots have no use for books or sex toys. Bezos becomes a pauper.
Neither do they buy cars—-so musk is reduced to poverty too.
Run all the farms with robots, but robots dont eat.
So no farms either.
this is why there is no ”plot” to kill off humankind
musk,trump are nobodys just patsies to bring the plan in to reduce the worlds population by any means necessary they see us as a number we dont exist to them they like us know that we are in a bit of a pickle and think surely if we take a zero off the population that should greatly help out the situation are the Georgia guidestones an accident or a bold declaration that something needed to be done to postpone Judgement Day.
We don’t need a plan to reduce the world’s population.
Nissan news .
https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2024/12/a03e03dbba61-update1-japan-automakers-honda-nissan-arranging-merger-talks-source.html
I have seen other stories about a possible merger between Nissan and Honda. This is what a CNN article says:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/17/business/honda-nissan-merger-talks/index.html
Had Nissan not already merged with renault?
Renault is a part owner of Nissan. From the article I quoted:
” Renault has since [departure of president] sharply reduced its ownership stake in Nissan, weakening the Japanese automaker.
We are in the second generation of merging. Fiat merged with Chrysler, and now there is a new entity called Stellantis (Student might know which makers are in that group). Nissan merged with Renault and now with Honda. Western manpower is too expensive and energy is too expensive to make cars. It is a sector in sharp decline, but whatever car future is there is with Russia and China.
Stellantis:
Abarth
Alfa Romeo
Chrysler
Citroen
Dodge
Ds Automobile
Fiat
Jeep
Lancia
Leap Motor (Chinese)
Maserati
Opel
Peugeot
Ram trucks
Vauxall
https://www.hdmotori.it/fiat/articoli/n589516/marchi-gruppo-stellantis-quali-sono/
But Elkann family will still own directly Cnh group which produces trucks and tractors (transport of goods and agriculture)
Iveco
New Holland
Case
https://www.industriaitaliana.it/iveco-group-cnh-industrial-fpt-industrial/
Curiously Elkann derives from El Khan which means ‘the boss’ , ‘the king’, ‘the ruler’.
With his grand father tthe matter was less clear, because his surname was Agnelli, which means Lamb.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_(title)
Again curiously, Khan was the typical term used in the Khazar kingdom to call the king, that is The Khan.
https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazaria
Nomem Omen
https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomen_omen
Not so curious. They are all tribe.
About interest rates, the stock market, and what might be ahead for the stock market:
https://quoththeraven.substack.com/p/its-christmas-chaos-all-over-again
Something most people don’t remember:
Also,
Near the end, he provides a quote we have heard before:
Bitcoin and the stock market have both been a little like tulip mania. How can this end well?
The depletion paradox .
https://blog.gorozen.com/blog/the-depletion-paradox
According to the authors:
.
The authors then explain depletion and the Hubbert Curve.
The situation does sound frightening. The world has been looking to the US for growth in gas exports and well as growing oil supply (and exports). These things likely can’t happen, making the world situation worse than most people expect.
Somehow, we need AI to suddenly provide better extraction results, and keep them up. Or there will need to be some uses squeezed out.
My expectation is that the tops of hierarchical organizations worldwide are in trouble. This is another example.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/vatican-on-the-brink-of-bankruptcy-due-to-dramatic-decline-in-global-donations-under-pope-francis-leadership/ar-AA1w1WEb
Vatican ‘on the brink of Bankruptcy’ due to dramatic decline in global donations under Pope Francis’ Leadership
Pope Francis was pushing covid vaccines, too.
I am sure that funding pensions is a big issue, too. There are a huge number of retired clergy:
When I was a young lad I went for a retreat to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Bardstown, Kentucky. What lead my there were the writings of Thomas Merton.
Anyway, even with austere life the monks live a long life. When Merton first entered the walls, the monks slept on burlap straw, had very little heat and no air conditioning in the hot summers. After Merton became famous and with his book money, modern life crept in with infrastructure.
…..
Forty-three monks, ranging in age from 40 to 100 years old, now live at Gethsemani — the proto-abbey of North America. And people from around the country visit the abbey where they can share in the prayer life of the monks, Brother Quenon noted.
…Monks also work at making fudge and fruitcakes for the mail-order business that provides their livelihood, said Brother Quenon.
“Work and prayer should complement each other. Manual labor helps your prayer. Praying only can become arid,” he said. “If things are well ordered, you can pray and work at the same time. … It’s a lifting up of the soul.”
https://gethsemanifarms.org/?srsltid=AfmBOorr4js-OshVeO8vZixa8ZKoJSHYd-BGVcVXfB6KKV9RrgMpI_jz
When leaving I gave an old monk my disposable razors with can of shaving cream…saying ” It must be hard to get a good shave in this place”…
He chuckled and accepted knowing what I meant…
Syria
The release of prisoners from Syrian jails – which we are portraying as justice – will bring back the rise of ISIS.
‘‘Real’ danger of ISIS regrouping in Syria after fall of al-Assad, experts warn
With the fall of the al-Assad regime in Syria, experts warn that the terror outfit could be clawing its way back
(…) in the aftermath of the collapse of the al-Assad government, countless inmates were released from prisons across Syria”
https://english.alarabiya.net/News/middle-east/2024/12/19/-real-danger-of-isis-regrouping-in-syria-after-fall-of-al-assad-experts-warn
If there are not enough jobs that pay well to go around, and corresponding goods and services, I can easily imagine some sort of internal dissent. ISIS regrouping could be the cause.
Yes Gail, additionally, from what I’ve read on recent Syrian history, I think there are now in that Country foreign mercenaries whose origin is from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Uiguri region (which is a Chinese one, but with Turkish heritage) and maybe others that have been called in the past in that Country in order to fight.
Now that prisons have been opened, the only job that they know is to fight, rape, kidnap, plunder and blackmail.
And like drb correctly defined previously, they are ‘cani sciolti’, that is wild dogs without owners.
“cani sciolti” much like the ruling class of the west.
Sorry Ed, but those people are in my view ‘loyal dogs’
That sounds concerning.
..and without loyalty to anything. Literally translated “unleashed dogs”.
thats why the israelis destroyed the syrian military infrastructure—to stop it falling into the hands of isis
Yes Norman, in that part I think that Israel made a correct action.
Why is Elon’s AI training computer located in crime ridden Memphis? The TVA, Tennessee Valley Authority. Elon gain 10 years on the competition waiting ten years to build nukes. Some times the old ways are the best ways. Go Elon!
Total electricity generation has been slow to build up.
In Georgia, with the new nuclear power, the electricity rates keep rising. I recently read about five increases in the last two years. This keeps people adding insulation and keeping indoor temperatures lower, if they use electric heat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5SlH_HM46A
Trump has a new look. He is not Orange Man he is now White Man.
One does not become president without using every trick in the book.
Uff he is looking old! What happens when people realize that he doesn’t have the answers? 🤷🏻♂️😳and he is about as clueless as the federal reserve when it comes to economics!
Russia seem unwilling to fight the enemy. FE is right this is a super strange war. Maybe Russian leadership should move to China and give all of Russia to China. Then China can fight for Russian fossil fuels.
Intermittent solar and wind crashes coal and nuclear, or the price of coal and nuclear skyrockets when sun stops shining and wind stops blowing.
Similarly, the AI and robots crash the humans, but the intermittent technology needs them for survival.
Only living organisms can sustain machines. The humans are bioreactors. The plants and animals are bioreactors. But solar panels, wind turbines not.
What do bioreactors need? They do not need intermittent solar or wind. They need sun, fuel and backup heat.
Who needs solar panels? Who needs wind turbines when the bioreactors run in n an emergency mode due to the lack of fuel?
Somehow, we seem to need a very complex system that can translate intermittent wind and solar to cheap fossil fuels, to keep our food and transport systems operating. It is hard to see how this can happen, but perhaps some small inroads can be made. Ultimately, humans are the buyers of the end products. We definitely need heat in winter and food year-round.
” cheap fossil fuels”
Cheap liquid hydrocarbons.
“It is hard to see how this can happen,”
All the pieces except the gassifier exist at industrial scale. There is no reason to expect that part to be very expensive.
Funding it may be a problem because the VCs want a software produce with a fast return on investment.
the point you miss about fossil fuels
is that they have no value until they are used—if we make cheap oil all will be well in the world.
apart from setting fire to an oilwell, and keeping warm that way, fossil fuel needs complex machinery in order to exploit the energy within it.
making that machinery itself is a big energy/resources consumer. when Ford made his Model T, it sold for (eventually) $260.
Now cars cost $0000s, plus the vast infrastructure to allow them to actually run—all of it oil dependent.
“the point you miss about fossil fuels”
The point you miss is that I am not talking about fossil fuels.
Keith
i have been known to be wrong
but
if you are reconstituting hydrocarbons from landfill, back into oil,—just about the only material in there would be plastic.
is there another source of plastic other than a fossil fuel feedstock?
“source of plastic”
Irrelevant.
Back at the start of the Industrial Revolution they made “town gas” by heating coke (burning it) then shutting off the air and blowing steam into the white hot coke. This made CO and hydrogen. My proposal is to heat any carbon source in steam with excess renewable power then feed the syngas to a Fisher Tropsch plant. It takes 3 MWh to vaporize a ton of carbon in steam. This avoids burning the carbon to provide process heat.
“The Fischer–Tropsch process (FT) is a collection of chemical reactions that converts a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, known as syngas, into liquid hydrocarbons. These reactions occur in the presence of metal catalysts, typically at temperatures of 150–300 °C (302–572 °F) and pressures of one to several tens of atmospheres. The Fischer–Tropsch process is an important reaction in both coal liquefaction and gas to liquids technology for producing liquid hydrocarbons.[1]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process
Sasol has an F/T plant in Qatar which makes 34,000 bbl/day of synthetic diesel. The only part that does not exist already at scale is the electric heated gassifier. There is no reason it would be very expensive, certainly much less than platinum containing electrolytic cells.
The problem with using trash for the carbon source is that we don’t make enough of it. Can we collect enough biomass? Don’t know. The US DoD had an experimental project that made 11 gallons of diesel from a ton of trash. i think they burned much of the trash to supply energy. This method would make about 80 gallons per ton of trash.
As the economy fails, the amount of trash falls rapidly. Also, transporting the trash to where it is to be burned usually takes diesel.
“As the economy fails, the amount of trash falls rapidly. ”
We need more carbon than the trash has anyway, so add coal as needed.
“Also, transporting the trash to where it is to be burned usually takes diesel.”
The point of this project is to make diesel,so filling up the trash trucks should not be a problem.
Where to site such a plant is difficult. The F/T part scales down to 34,000 bbl/day. That’s small for a refinery. One of the refineries being closed in the LA area is (i think) 110,000 bbl/day.
//////Back at the start of the Industrial Revolution they made “town gas” by heating coke (burning it).//////
no they didnt–coke was the residue left after gasification of coal
put simply they made ”town gas” by heating coal in the absence of air, the residue from that was coke—coke was used to smelt iron, because gasification removed the impurities from coal.
the gas was used for heating, lighting and so on.
you can certainly use ”biomass’ for gas extraction, but ‘growing fuel” isnt going to leave much for humankind to eat.
they used gas from heated wood to run cars in ww2
///////The Flemish scientist Jan Baptista van Helmont used the name “gas” in his Origins of Medicine (c. 1609) to describe his discovery of a “wild spirit” which escaped from heated wood and coal, and which “differed little from the chaos of the ancients”. Similar experiments were carried out in 1681 by Johann Becker of Munich and in 1684 by John Clayton of Wigan, England. The latter called it “Spirit of the Coal”. William Murdoch (later known as Murdock) discovered new ways of making, purifying and storing gas. Among others, he illuminated his house at Redruth and his cottage at Soho, Birmingham in 1792, the entrance to the Manchester Police Commissioners premises in 1797, the exterior of the factory of Boulton and Watt in Birmingham, and a large cotton mill in Salford, Lancashire in 1805.[2]/////
“put simply they made ”town gas” by heating coal in the absence of air,”
“Town gas is a more general term referring to manufactured gaseous fuels produced for sale to consumers and municipalities.[1]
The original coal gas was produced by the coal gasification reaction,[2] ”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_gas
What I am talking about is about 1/3rd of the way into the article.
“The problem of nitrogen dilution was overcome by the blue water gas (BWG) process, developed in the 1850s by Sir William Siemens. The incandescent fuel bed would be alternately blasted with air followed by steam. The air reactions during the blow cycle are exothermic, heating up the bed, while the steam reactions during the make cycle, are endothermic and cool down the bed. The products from the air cycle contain non-calorific nitrogen and are exhausted out the stack while the products of the steam cycle are kept as blue water gas. This gas is composed almost entirely of CO and H2, and burns with a pale blue flame similar to natural gas. ”
The article is misleading in places. I might rewrite it.
California issues a STATE OF EMERGENCY, activates PANDEMIC PROCEDURES as bird flu spreads to 16 states!
https://x.com/GovPressOffice/status/1869461653747794301
If you don’t have fossil fuels, you need to figure out an excuse to keep people at home.
To be seen in conjunction with yesterday’s market moves.
An ’emergency’ has to be kept in reserve just in case markets get ‘out of hand’.
Interesting idea!
Jeffrey Sachs interviewed by Tucker Carlson: The Inevitable War With Iran, and Biden’s Attempts to Sabotage Trump.
Very interesting interview, I think fundamental expecially for every US person.
It demonstrates that clever, cultured and informed persons also in US are really worried for what the US deep State is doing in various parts of the world.
It gives important background of what really happened on recent and less recent international facts, including Syria and Ukraine.
https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-sachs-3
Jeffrey Sachs tells us that Israel has run American foreign policy in the Middle East for the past 30 years. Syria was over thrown because Obama wanted it overthrown. Every country that supports Palestine is a target to be overthrown.
There is a transcript available for this almost two hour interview.
“ when you
43:02 get into energy security you know as strong as the Israeli Lobby is they’re not as strong as you know Exon Mobile
43:11 standard when we’re talking you know hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars of economic potential uh with a
43:18 global scale um the Israel Lobby doesn’t control them the Israeli Lobby doesn’t
43:23 control the pharmaceutical industry the Israeli Lobby doesn’t control a whole bunch of things in the United States they have a very limited um you know
43:31 span of control and influence on things that pertains particularly to Israel uh
43:37 the isi lobby does not control the Pentagon I’ll just make that absolutely clear the Israeli Lobby doesn’t control
43:42 the Pentagon they may have the ability to influence the Pentagon”?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNsjtpqlTQE
“I saw the reality of the um pro-israeli Lobby
45:47 and the influence that they have everywhere they’re everywhere they they
45:52 control everything but at the same time within the United States within the
45:58 establishment um there are elements that are just vehemently anti-israel um where where the lobby
46:05 hasn’t broken into and these are you know deeply entrenched things and that’s when you get into energy security you
46:11 know as strong as the Israeli Lobby is they’re not as strong as you know Exon Mobile
46:18 standard when we’re talking you hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars of economic potential uh with a global
46:25 scale um the Israeli Lobby doesn’t control them the Israeli Lobby doesn’t control the pharmaceutical industry the
46:32 Israeli Lobby doesn’t control a whole bunch of things in United States they have a very limited um you know span of
46:38 control and influence on things that pertains particularly to Israel uh the
46:43 Israeli Lobby does not control the Pentagon I’ll just make that absolutely clear the Israeli Lobby doesn’t control
46:49 the Pentagon they may have the ability to influence the Pentagon they’ve sucked parasites Here There and Everywhere they
46:56 know control the Pentagon um and they don’t control the military-industrial
47:02 complex as much I can tell you that we when you take a look at the amount of money we send to Israel it Pals in
47:08 comparison with the other contracts that we put around the world I mean what was
47:13 $3.8 billion dollar a year as our military sales to uh to Israel we conclude contracts bigger than
47:20 that with other people you know on a monthly basis so the idea that the military-industrial complex is be hold
47:27 to Israel is absurd um the the Israelis have a lot of
47:32 influence but there’s a lot of independent uh the big thing is on policy that impacts Israel where a
47:40 specific policy impacts Israel the lobby has a tremendous amount of influence but
47:45 um you know I will tell you right now that we did not invade Iraq because of
47:53 Israel I mean Israel played a role in it they a supporting role but I remind people that um up until
48:00 1998 uh the Israelis were actually working with the United Nations to
48:06 achieve the disarmament of Iraq uh in opposition to the American policy of regime change see the Israelis had a
48:12 regime change policy in place that was brought to fruition right after the Gulf War ended um when Yuri sagay um the
48:22 commander of uh Military Intelligence made a decision that they need to kill San Hussein . . . the United States we went to
50:57 war in Iraq not for Israel we went war in Iraq for oil and Regional dominance
51:03 now people say well that’s part of the project for New American Century and all this stuff yes that’s peripheral but
51:08 America Goes to War for America”?
It sounds like Scott Ritter is not as convinced that Israel runs American foreign policy as Jeffery Sachs is.
We know that Europe has been very supportive of the Ukraine attack, but the US seems to be backing down.
Yes Gail, but actually Sachs clarifies the important detail that US foreign policy has been designed by an US citizen, with polish origin, called Zbigniew Brzezinski, who became US professor and political analyst and was the master of the so called ‘Neocons’ policy.
Sachs explains that US has been following Brzezinsky’s indications for the last 30 years.
Indications that are based on wrong assumptions and have created only chaos in the world.
Sachs explains that it is high time to change this dangerous mindset for US.
Thanks for the synopsis of the video. It is hard to find time to listen to long videos. I discovered the transcript is behind a paywall.
Thank you Gail, about the news with linkw that I report here, I do my best to be reliable and to give a correct contribute about them.
Tucker trying to stay relevant after being booted off TV.
Tucker got 34M views with Jeffrey Sachs, seems pretty relevant to me.
https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1868789953443832205
As a Columbia grad, Sachs is the only thing about Columbia that I am proud of.
I remember Sachs as one of the OG banksters, looting the ex-Soviet-Union. Carlson is part of the intel community. There’s a reason they are making these ‘revelations’.
WOW! Sure is popular
As the climate is changing, the energy problems are slightly alleviated, but the pollution and water shortages make the quality food scarce.
More and more solar panels will not solve this problem.
I.would say that China is a perfect example of this failure.
There will be s huge crash of all cryptocurrencies, when the world realizes that you can not eat them.
the solar panel is only useful in the context of a drastic reduction in energy needs.
“Tell me what you need, I’ll tell you how to do without it”
You need to have the water where the sun and soil is. The solar panels can be moved easily, but soil and water not.
https://youtu.be/oOMA_a2Y_bI?si=SO0l_0bSzSQqMekm
Cities need huge amounts of energy to bring fresh water and food in. They need huge amounts of energy to transport waste back out. If cities don’t have these things, and jobs that can support the residents (also powered by energy), cities have to shrink.
that is why cities are the size they are.
prior to the industrial revolution, cities couldn’t grow bigger than about 1 million, purely from the problem of fresh food/water in, and waste water out.,
and even then they were a rarity, Rome, London, etc.
Latest news on Russian coal reserves.
Months ago I wrote on this blog (https://ourfiniteworld.com/2024/06/22/the-advanced-economies-are-headed-for-a-downfall/comment-page-4/#comments:~:text=of%20resource)%20and-,Tunguska%20basin,-(around%202%2C2%20trillion) about two of the world’s largest coal reserves in Russia that are still completely untouched.
Well, a few days ago this news has been pubblished regarding the interest of energy-hungry China in extracting them by creating a railway network.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3290264/china-intrigued-russias-planned-rail-link-planets-largest-coalfield
These are huge reserves.
The Tunguska Basin has more than 2,000 billion tons of coal in place.
The recovery rate is not known, yet.
The USGS allows us to have an estimate of the recovery rate.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/usbmic/ic-9368/
From the article above:
Standard, or “average,” recovery factors were established for each of several conditions and mining methods. It is recognized these are not, and cannot be considered, definitive under all conditions, but they do reflect today’s technology and economic conditions more accurately than the often used 50% factor.
The following mine recovery factors are used for this study:
1. For contour strip mines-78% where the coal seam is less than 36 in thickness, and 93% where the coal seam is greater than 36 in thickness.
2. For auger mines-30%.
3. For continuous miner mines-62% where the pillars are 40 ft by 40 ft, and 57% where the pillars are 80 ft by 120 ft.
4. For longwall mines-84% where the pillars are 40 ft by 40 ft, and 78% where the pillars vary in size.
So even a modest 25% recovery yields 500 billion tons of reserves only from the Tunguska basin.
There is also another massive coal field, the Lena basin, with around 1600 billion tons of resource.
As oil reaches the plateau phase king coal will come back.
Full steam ahead!
Quite a bit of the coal extracted now (in Mongolia and China) has the problem of high shipping costs. This might be alleviated by rail transport rather than truck transport, but building rail transport requires resources. It also needs a fuel to operate it. I suppose that electricity (from coal) might be the answer, but all of this needs to be built. The terrain is quite mountainous. All of this must be taken into account when plans are made for shipment.
There is also a lot of coal in Alaska that can be reached, if train lines are built. Even if it can be shipped to southern Alaska, it likely would need to be shipped further, to be of much benefit to established residential and manufacturing areas.
The Chinese are building long distance DC transmission lines to get Mongolian and Xinjiang coal energy into the populated areas of eastern China.
Their other trick is to use stranded coal to manufacture polysilicon. This has a very high effective energy density. One gram of solar grade silicon will produce as much electricity over 30 years, as a gram of uranium. So it absolutely can be shipped by rail ir truck. A lot of Chinese PV production is simply a way of converting stranded coal into something they can ship economically and use to make power where they need it. It is a stroke of genius in its own way. But clearly isn’t something that is sustainable in any way.
yes. Foundries ought to go where the coal is, too.
“One gram of solar grade silicon will produce as much electricity over 30 years, as a gram of uranium.”
But production from uranium is level; production from solar is quite intermittent. It takes a lot of batteries and a lot of natural gas backup to work around the non-level characteristic of solar panels.
Sounds like a good application for a coal log pipeline.
This seems to be what we are seeing:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/tone-regarding-ukraines-future-has-definitely-shifted-significantly-and-fast
By Teeuwe Mevissen, Senior Macro Strategist at Rabobank
So, now we have a reason for continuing to add more debt. Even Europe can participate in this. My expectation is that this may take the place of the “green” initiatives we had in the past.
https://youtu.be/Z_bk4EQ-BNg?si=BBpaZ1INqDlzM8jU
Doomberg says we are swimming I. Hydrocarbons and all we have to do is tap them whenever we want ?!? California has more shale than Texas etc Argentina has huge reserves as well?
One word ” idiot ” . I m surprised subscribers pay to listen to him .
I am afraid that Doomberg doesn’t understand the real situation. It must read AI stories.
Oh look the guy does botox. or is it a facelift? I still prefer female bimbos.
“The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimated in 2014 that the 1,750 square mile Monterey Formation could, as an unconventional resource, yield about 600 million barrels of oil, from tight oil contained in the formation, down sharply from their 2011 estimate of a potential 15.4 billion barrels.”
Wikipedia
Collapse begins at the periphery and migrates to the centre .
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/textron-halts-atv-utv-snowmobile-production-amid-imploding-consumer-demand
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/polaris-reports-challenging-retail-demand-atvs-jetskis
People stop buying these devices that use a lot of liquid fuel but are only a form of recreation.
I would expect that the sale of pull behind mobile homes would be down, too.
KTM is widely acknowledged as the biggest motorcycle manufacturer in Europe. It is also facing insolvency.
a mobile home or a tiny house can be a response to the energy shortage.
The long term strategy I’m looking at with several properties in the family is to pay caah for a duplex in a small rural town with some industry, university and tourism to establish a physical address, rent out half to pay for taxes etc and then live seasonally at the cabin on 30 acres for the remainder. 50’s, only child with no heirs. If one of my cousin’s kids shows interest I will quietly leave it all to them or a land trust.
tourism??
lol
thats the same as the saudis planning a ”post oil economic system”
i’d love to meet their economic advisor.
Comment from Harry’s blog .
George Kaplan on December 18, 2024 at 10:38 am
I was looking at EIA oil production numbers and it looks like next year might start to see noticeable production declines (but to hedge my bets I’ll also say that it may take to second half 2026). We are now seeing the effect of the dearth of discoveries from 2015 feeding through to few new greenfield projects coming on line. In the Gulf of Mexico there are four new projects next year and then only two more in construction, while some of the big producers are now coming off plateau(ish) production quite quickly, so annual decline will be significant from 2026. In Norway Johan Sverdrup is by far the biggest producer and is now off plateau, again there are a falling number of new projects so overall decline is likely from 2026. Mexico and China have been adding production for a couple of years but both now appear to be at secondary peaks. Kazakhstan peaked in 2019 and will start to decline more rapidly as its reserve to production ratio is only around eight years and there have been no recent discoveries (because the two main projects are western operated there is quite good data). Iraq is struggling but may turn around when new water injection facilities from TotalEnergies become available. Malaysia is entering faster decline. All USA tight oil basins except Permian are past peak and the Permian may only be able to maintain a plateau. Russia can’t expand offshore without western technology and its onshore fields are well past their best, and there must be human and equipment resource issues now biting, so is likely to continue declining. I am not sure about Canada but its conventional oil is declining slowly and it is difficult to add incrementally to existing oil sands projects (there’s also the issue of low EROI). Can Brazil, Guyana and Argentina and, later, Namibia and Suriname, fill any gaps? Not for long if at all I think (pretty well all other non OPEC-plus producers not mentioned are in decline and Kuwait, Algeria, Azerbaijan and Oman are also looking shaky).
When oil exports start declining at 3 or 4% (and rising) the emerging economic, geopolitical and social woes will make the stories above look like mildly sensitive gums compared to half a house brick in the mouth. The will be no resources for triage for the increasingly frequent climate destruction and no way to execute multibillion, decades long energy and mining projects. This is of course known to readers here but will be a complete surprise to politicians at all levels, MSM journalists and editors, most NGOs, most civil servants, the advertising industry, the health and wellness industry, pension fund managers, the sociopaths in company boardrooms etc. There is a huge gap between what people think they know of the economy and reality but at least a few heuristics have been learnt that seem to work, but only in times of growth, which means times of increasing oil supply. During contraction those same actions and reactions will almost surely make things worse.
Who is Harry? Can you link to it please?
Harry McGibb use to post here . He has his own blog now .
https://climateandeconomy.com/
But where will the enriched uranium come from?
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/oklo-signs-historic-agreement-data-center-company-switch-provide-12-gigawatts-through-2044
Oklo Spikes 13% After Signing ‘Historic’ Agreement With Data Center Company To Provide Power Through 2044
I am wondering if AI might have a place in solving our uranium and enriched uranium problem. We are very inefficient users of the power that seems to be available from uranium. Also, recycling spent fuel has not gone well. And of course, the upgrading issue is difficult, without nuclear warheads. Hubbert published charts showing nuclear powering the world for 5,000 years, but this vision of reality has not been realized to date.
Robotics could make fuel reprocessing and MOX fabrication easier. But it certainly isn’t a magic bullet. Machines handling radioactive materials will need maintenance by human beings. There will be a dose burden associated with that. Also, electronics are vulnerable to gamma rays just as human tissue is vulnerable. High doses to integrated circuits will destroy them. AI could help us to optimise facility designs.
A mass producible robot like Elon Musk’s proposed android would be able to handle plutonium without need for cumbersome and fiddly gloveboxes. If such a robot is able to handle gamma emitting materials with a sufficient operational life, it would make implimentation of the thorium fuel cycle easier. Unity conversion ratio light water reactors, based upon a closed 233U-232Th fuel cycle, are not really a technical stretch. They are just undesirable if we have to use people to load pellets into fuel rods. If we can automate fuel assembly, then a closed fuel cycle is achievable. If not, the assembly of this type of MOX fuel would lead to a lot of dose to fuel assemblers.
I suppose that the electronics will be a cheap part of the robot, so the next board can be snapped on when needed. On top of that the inner electronics (near the beam pipe) used at the LHC experiments at CERN function under very high doses. You just use what they developed. You could make the robot out of some ceramics, so there is little neutron activation and on a rail with a trailing rope so when it goes dead you can pull it back manually.
We could use radiation hardened electronics, or just standard stuff that is periodically replaced.
Neutron activation shouldn’t happen in reprocessing and fuel fabrication facilities. Not unless there is a criticality accident. Contamination with radioactive materials is possible and probably unavoidable. Beta emissions especially, have bad effects on polymers. And most fission products are beta-gamma emitters. So exposed polymer components must either be avoided or replaced on a predetermined schedule. Not necessarily a severe problem, just something that has to be planned for.
I think this kind of thorium cycle could work. It is technically a breeder cycle, but conversion ratio is only 1.01. This means we cannot use excess 233U from one reactor to start another. But after a HALEU starter core, the reactor should make enough new fissile material to refuel itself. That cuts uranium needs very substantially, as HALEU is only needed to start the reactor.
An LWR based thorium cycle would require development of specific reprocessing and fuel fabrication technology. That is time and cost. No way around it. But it will be worth the effort in the long term.
Neutron activation happens whenrever there are neutrons. You can choose your elements to have a few, or many. The CERN rad hard electronics is something else though. I don’t remember all the details, but basically it can last much longer if it is always kept on.
In my opinion, civilization will have to regress for five hundred years, until we rebuild the elites who will move on to the next level of civilization, not the country buys and city bumpkins who want a free ride to Type I Civ.
People like Homer Hickam thought they would have a place in space. Which is wrong – people like Hickam should never have been put near space programs.
Again it is the Great war and WW2 who opened universities to educate peoples who should never have been educated; however, the trend is reversing, as only universities which need all four arms and legs to graduate will matter.
Only those who have a stake in civilization should be allowed to participate.
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities?_sort=rank&_sortDirection=asc
Public universities have all but disappeared from the list of the top 20 univ, the only universities worth attending. Unfortunately two institutions linger on but Berkeley and UCLA will have to be excised off so there would be no participation from CA, and no one who attended a public university could call themselves educated.
What energy source will be available in 500 years to restart industrial civilization?
the same energy source that will keep the freezniks frozen
ie, the same as it was 500 years in the past
Ask and it shall be given, and it won’t even require a cubic mile of Pt.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/us-world-s-1st-commercial-400mw-nuclear-fusion-plant-to-power-150-000-homes/ar-AA1w5pBo?ocid=msedgntp&pc=U531&cvid=dc897c4c424c4848a8ed53110b025347&ei=21
Drum roll please, fusion to the rescue and now it is less than ten years away.
Personally I hope it works, will be a bridge technology so we can get searching our solar system for Pt.
Dennis L.
“expected to be operational in the early 2030s.”
Perhaps. We will see. Scaling up is a challenge, I expect. And we are still dealing with only electricity. Making liquid fuels takes carbon, even if we can generate surplus wind and solar energy, when we don’t want it.
Dennis, these people have yet to demonstrate breakeven at prototype stage. Claiming that they can build a practical powerplant that can power 150,000 homes (150MWe?), sounds a lot like hyperbole. Something designed to suck investment money into a pet project.
But as I have said before, if someone can develop a fusion based neutron source which can at least break even in net energy terms, that would be very valuable as a driver assembly for fusion-fission hybrid reactors. If a fusion reactor can convert input electrical energy into fast neutron energy, at a ratio 1:1, then it can generate power from fast-fission of 238U and also function as a fissile fuel factory. That is what fusion offers in the near term and it is where the development focus should be. A hybrid would have a greatly superior breeding ratio to a sodium cooled FBR.
pure bile! that is what these civ. I types seem to go on.
there is no ‘higher level of civilisation’
just as there has been no ”lower level of civilisation”
civilisation is what the available level of energy allows it to be.
when we only had the motive power of horse, sails and windmills—that defined the living standards of humankind.—civilisation moved at a walking pace.
and so it will again.
there is no magical source of energy to make things different.
“no magical source ”
You could go outside and look up.
i do—constantly
it reinforces the certainties of the physical laws that confine us to planet earth.
humankind in its current form is an infestation on the surface of the planet, we are not endowed with superior intellect, we are not the dominant species here.
we have merely written holy books to convince ourselves that we are.
“i do—constantly”
Have you noticed the big fusion energy generator?
From a website
“The sun generates more energy in 1 hour than Earth uses annually”
That’s true but talk about an understatement.
3.828×10 exp 26 W, convert to TW, 3.828×10 exp 14 TWh every hour.
Total human energy use is ~15 TW steady state. 131400 TWh/year.
So one hour of the sun’s output would power current human energy use for 2,9 billion years.
We use about 1000 times as much sunlight on cropland. If you count that, 2.9 million years.
If the light blocker at Tabby’s Star is an alien artifact, the are capturing around 1.4 million times the energy the human race uses.
Not sure how this one is going to work out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDmFB7AQSR0
Basically AI and medicine.
Dennis L.
I can tell you. AI has been instructed to prescribe more statins, more chemo, more vaccines. It’s science man.
I’m not sure it’s science it’s economics man! Those studies have all been done by pharmaceutical companies so that have put the info in false information in false information out. Statins are a joke!
Artificial intelligence might be helpful in diagnosis, I would think.
Treatment plans, I am less sure AI will help. Current thinking in the US is, “More treatment is better.” Lifestyle changes have become impossible.
Putin is finding out that immigration comes with security costs. And terrorists are finding out that promised recompense is not guaranteed.
https://tass.com/society/1889031
MOSCOW, December 18. /TASS/. The perpetrator of the terrorist attack that killed Chief of Russia’s Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Troops Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov has been detained.
– The suspect is an Uzbek national born in 1995.
– The suspect was promised $100,000 and relocation to an EU country in exchange for carrying out the attack.
– The perpetrator was transferred to investigators.
They will issue a stern rebuke to the US.
The world waits after Ukraine assassinates top Putin general in Moscow
“In the early hours of yesterday morning, Russian general Igor Kirillov and his deputy were killed when a bomb concealed in an e-scooter detonated as they left an apartment.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/18/wednesday-briefing-the-world-waits-after-ukraine-assassinates-top-putin-general-in-moscow
Never fear, retribution will be swift (sarc), Zakharova states:
“The Permanent Mission of Russia to the UN in New York will certainly raise the issue of the terrorist attack during the meeting of the Security Council on the supply of Western weapons to Ukraine, which we requested for December 20.”
What the Russians could do in this game (I’m not saying should or must do—in the first place, I wouldn’t want to say anything that could be perceived as incitement, and in the second I have even less clue about how to conduct geopolitical strategy than Paul Craig Roberts does) would be to send a signal by assassinating a dozen or so top EU and US people who have been getting particularly on their nerves and who are well known enough and high enough up that their assassinations cannot be ignored.
Whether the Russians will do this or not is entirely their own business. But if they don’t respond by upping the ante, they will be sending another message—that they can be nudged with impunity. And so, the nudging will go on until either the Russians are beaten into submission or the Russians do something that scares their enemies in the West into backing off.
Perhaps NATO is thinking that provoking the Russians into WW3 is a winning strategy, having worked out on the back of a beer mat that NATO countries can command five times the population and ten times the GNP than the Russians can. If so, I hope NATO will give that idea another think.
Those who’ve read the ‘alternative media’ since 2020/21 could easily name 10-20 apparent ‘monsters’ in govt and industry or even academia. I wouldn’t mourn their passing.
But in ‘civilised’ England I prefer the idea of a trial to a sniper’s bullet, or even the 1978 poisoned umbrella that the USSR used against an ‘enemy’. Am I being too soft?
Also how would the Russians effectively force a suspect to appear before a Russian court, or could they get enough support to use the international criminal court?
Drb, I’ve seen that also various ‘so called’ Sirian rebels are from Uzbekistan.
Do you have an opinion why Uzbeks work for Western and Arab interests against Russian ones?
Thanks
“cani sciolti”. Uzbekistan is fairly peaceful but all those immigrants are unable to find good jobs at home. You can go to the Migration Center near Moscow, Sakharovo, and on any given day there will be 10,000 central asians, and you will be the only one not from there. Once you are in Russia 100,000 dollars will be a significant sum.
A strongly worded letter, a statement at the UN, etc.
Anyway, he is a legitimate target, being military while Ukraine and Russia are at war. This is totally different from Dugina or the Crocus attack. The only reason this is an event is because it reveals Russian security weaknesses.
you also keep to remember that this is possibly the hundredth assassination by Ukraine of Russians. There was one last week too, one of the biggest rocket designers in Russia.
“The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed.”
-Homer (the Iliad))
We only have a finite amount of time to accomplish whatever we want to do.
Walmart employees are now wearing body cameras in some stores
“Walmart has started giving store-level associates body cameras to wear as part of a pilot program at some of its U.S. locations, CNBC has learned.
The tech, widely deployed in law enforcement, is now being expanded into retail to help deter conflict and prevent theft.
It’s not clear how many of Walmart’s stores have the recording devices, but some locations now have signs at entry points warning shoppers that it has “body-worn cameras in-use,” according to witnesses and photos posted online.
In at least one store in Denton, Texas — about 40 miles north of Dallas — an associate checking receipts was seen wearing a yellow-and-black body camera earlier this month, according to a shopper who shared a photo with CNBC.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/17/walmart-employees-wearing-body-cameras.html
Elderly Man shoved onto subway tracks in NYC after riding Holiday Train
“NEW YORK — A joy-filled holiday tradition turned terrifying in an instant for one New York City man Sunday. The 72-year-old was pushed onto the subway tracks after riding the Holiday Nostalgia Train.
“Sunday, he stepped out to ride New York’s Nostalgia Train.
“I became that 10-year-old boy that was on those cars with my family going to visit relatives,” Robert said.
Bu when he stepped off at the 34th Street-Herald Square station and paused to capture the train leaving the station, the normally hyper alert New Yorker got caught in the moment and let his guard down. That’s when a stranger came out of nowhere and shoved Robert onto the tracks.
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/holiday-nostalgia-train-subway-shove-nyc/
No description of the stranger given
No explanation necessary
According to the camera,
But body cameras and reviewing this footage does add to costs. It tends to make stores even more expensive than shopping online.
China Looks To Build The Largest Human-Made Object In Space
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/china-looks-build-largest-human-made-object-space
“d unaffected by weather.
“China is charging ahead with plans to build a prototype Space Based Solar Power (SBSP) device by 2030”
Looks Keith may see his dream solar satellite come true.
I am against it; warming the earth with exogenous energy does not seem to be a wise idea. Our spaceship earth needs a rest, it needs to heal and it will heal, we are along for the ride but an important part of the ride. I enjoy Keith, but solar energy beyond what lands on earth directly from the sun is probably not a great idea.
Move manufacturing into space, this gets rid of the waste problem and essentially import energy to earth embedded in manufactured products. With ultra cheap energy make the goods very durable, heck make them out of Pt, no rust and easy to recycle.
Dennis L.
“warming the earth with exogenous energy ”
Power satellite rectennas release as heat no more than 15%. So a GW of power from space would release 150 MW. A one GW nuclear power plant releases about 2 GW of waste heat.
Even PV causes problems, it is much blacker than the ground under it, so about 75% of the output goes to local heating.
But I agree, moving what you can into space is a good idea.
Keith, you say: “Power satellite rectennas release as heat no more than 15%. So a GW of power from space would release 150 MW. ”
And then, in your reply to Peter, you say: “If you think about it, virtually all the energy from a power satellite turns to heat. It is just the physics.”
Do you see any contradiction between those two statements?
It seems to me, that if a power satellite beams down energy that otherwise would not be reaching the surface of the earth, and that if all the energy that is beamed down ultimately turns into heat, so a GW of power from space would release a GW of heat into the environment.
But please correct me if I’ve got this wrong.
It also seems to me that the additional heat is of trivial importance since the Earth has an amazing capacity to maintain its temperature within a narrow range via a combination of possibly dozens of negative feedback phenomena, the most basic of which is that the hotter the surface of the earth gets, the more energy it radiates, and this energy ultimately disappears into the virtually infinite heat sink of outer space, never to return.
“any contradiction between those two statements? ”
Nope.
In the local area of the rectenna about 15% of the microwave beam power is lost and shows up as heat.
But virtually all electric power no matter the source degrades to heat.
“hotter the surface of the earth gets, the more energy it radiates”
That’s true. Without greenhouse gases though, the earth would ice over. But you can certainly have too much of a good thing, that’s what happened to Venus. CO2 blocks the outgoing heat and so does water. The last couple of years of record temperature may be due to the water injected into the stratosphere by the Hunga Tonga volcano. The scientists are still arguing about it.
NASA
https://www.nasa.gov › earth › tonga-eruption-blasted-unprecedented-amount-of-water-into-stratosphere
Tonga Eruption Blasted Unprecedented Amount of Water Into … – NASA
When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted on Jan. 15, it sent a tsunami racing around the world and set off a sonic boom that circled the globe twice. The underwater eruption in the South Pacific Ocean also blasted an enormous plume of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere – enough to fill
Leaving speculations about the role of “greenhouse gases” and comparisons between the Earth and Venus to one side for a minute — I take it that you agree that 1 GW of energy beamed down as infrared radiation from a space satellite (like the gentle rain from heaven) upon the place beneath, would eventually be transformed (or as you put it “degrades” into 1 GW heat, which warms the environment as it goes on its way back to space as 1 GW infrared radiation?
Net result—we get to use some electricity and the environment gets temporarily warmer, and then the environment’s negative feedbacks restore the temperature balance?
Or is this description erroneous in any way, in your expert opinion?
“as infrared radiation”
Almost all the proposals use microwaves. Infrared is blocked by clouds.
“gets temporarily warmer”
Steady state it gets permanently warmer as long as you are beaming down power.
Not much warmer though, sunlight is around a GW/km * 2. The reason CO2 warms up the earth is that it block outgoing radiation. The amount it blocks dwarfs human use of energy.
Thanks, Keith.
Not infrared, microwave! Point taken.
Re. CO2, I think most people here are tired of arguing about the role, if any, that that particular gas has in making the earth warmer.
We can all run little thought experiments or models in our imaginations, and the results we get are bound be wrong because we don’t have ALL the data on how the climate works.
And the narrative pushers provide us with nicely illustrated models that we can internalize so that we don’t even have to think or analyze or do any hard calculations for ourselves, and we can still pretend we know what’s really going on.
Something similar can be said regarding many of the subjects discussed on OFW. I gave up taking the narrative pushers’ models, but I also gave up thinking I know for certain about anything that is touched by politics—including COVID, vaccines, oil supplies, natural resource limits, EVs, Starship, genetics, and of course climate change. I guess that makes me the smartest person since Socrates, since at least I know that I know nothing.
“that particular gas has in making the earth warmer. ”
There is little doubt about the effect of CO2. Without it we would be freezing our collective asses off. Does a blanket keep you warmer? Same thing on a planetary scale with the CO2. Why does it get warm in a greenhouse? Simple, the light comes through the glass and warms it up, but the outgoing thermal radiation is reflected back by the glass.
CO2 is a good thing, but you know what they say about too much of a good thing;
The devil’s in the details, Keith.
You know basic physics, sand a bit more, so you also know that atmospheric physics are not nearly as simple as you make out.
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler” is a famous quote often attributed to Albert Einstein, meaning that when explaining or designing something, you should strive for the utmost simplicity without sacrificing accuracy or essential details by oversimplifying it; essentially, find the most basic form that still effectively conveys the idea.
By overstating the importance of CO₂’s roll in determining how hot the earth gets, are failing badly in doing that. Why is that, Keith? It can’t be through ignorance, can it?
You know that once you’ve put 27 blankets on your bed, adding a 28th is not going to make you any warmer? Please check it out. This is one experiment you can try at home!
You know that it is estimated that 50-70% of all the IR energy CO₂ can absorb is already being absorbed by CO₂ at 400 ppm? And you know that water vapor IR absorption bands overlap with CO₂ IR absorption bands, impacting the overall IR absorption efficiency of CO₂?
You know that CO₂ doesn’t only absorb outgoing IR and thereby preventing it from directly escaping into space, it also absorbs incoming IR from sunlight and thereby preventing it from reaching the lower atmosphere?
You know that CO₂ doesn’t only absorb IR radiation; it also emits IR radiation?—a feature that makes it a cooling gas in the stratosphere and the mesosphere where no sod lives. As a result, of increases in greenhouses gases like carbon dioxide, more heat is lost to space — and the upper atmosphere cools.
You know that the earth is a rotating sphere receiving most of its heat in the equatorial regions and transporting a lot of this heat to the temperate and finally to the polar regions via convection like a heat engine, so if it gets hotter for any reason, the heat engine works harder and the extra heat is transported north and south so that the tropics heat very little and we end up with a larger warm zone and smaller cold zones? During ice ages, the temperatures in the tropics don’t fall very much. Instead, not as much heat is sent to the temperature or polar regions, making the latter colder than a well-digger’s ass.
You know that the temperature in the troposphere typically decreases with increasing altitude? This phenomenon is known as the lapse rate. On average, the lapse rate is about 6.5°C per kilometer (or approximately 1.98°F per 1,000 feet) of elevation.
There is also a clear correlation between altitude and atmospheric pressure. In the standard atmosphere model, pressure decreases by about 12 hPa (hectopascals) for every 100 meters (approximately 33.5 hPa for every 1,000 feet) of elevation gain, although this can vary with temperature and humidity. While temperature and pressure are not directly correlated, they are both influenced by altitude. As altitude increases, temperature generally decreases (lapse rate), and atmospheric pressure also decreases.
Which means atmospheric temperature is strongly dependent on atmospheric pressure—something you totally ignore when alluding to the comparison between Earth and Venus, for example. You cite Venus’s extremely high temperature as the result of it’s atmosphere being mostly CO2, but you neglect to mention that atmospheric pressure at the surface of Venus is approximately 92 times that of Earth’s atmospheric pressure at sea level—a glaring omission and a gross simplification.
I could go on, but it’s my bath time….
“atmospheric physics are not nearly as simple as you make out. ”
This is not an area that I know a lot about. The sudden and unexpected rise in temperature world wide over the last two years is still being debated by those trying to understand it.
Water vapor is, as you know, another big greenhouse gas complicated by it making clouds. I suspect the huge water injection into the stratosphere by the Hunga Tonga volcano is the cause, but the people who understand this business are still discussing it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunga_Tonga%E2%80%93Hunga_Ha%CA%BBapai#December_2021%E2%80%93January_2022_eruption
“In August 2022, a NASA report on the January 2022 eruption of Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai stated, “The huge amount of water vapor hurled into the atmosphere, as detected by NASA’s Microwave Limb Sounder, The excess water vapor injected by the Tonga volcano… could remain in the stratosphere for several years… may have a small, temporary warming effect… would not be enough to noticeably exacerbate climate change effects.”[74] Later it was found that the excess water vapor from the 2022 eruption would remain in the stratosphere for about 8 years, and help making the 2023 ozone hole one of the largest and most persistent in history.[75][76] In addition, research suggests that the water vapor could influence winter weather across the globe for several years.[76]”
Ten years ago I was concerned about the ozone damage from enough traffic into space the build power satellites. Since I don’t know enough about the topic to produce a definitive answer, I talked NOAA into doing a study.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2016EF000399
” Acknowledgments
“The authors would like to thank Keith Henson of the L5 Society for suggesting this study. They also thank Keith Henson and Richard Varvill of Reaction Engines Ltd for their helpful discussions in the development of this paper. This study was supported in part by NOAA’s Climate Program Office. ”
https://htyp.org/design_to_cost
Agree with Keith. For every 1W of electric power that enters the grid from an SPS, microwave power transmission will heat the atmosphere by 0.4W. For ground based solar, for every 1We produced, some 4Wth end up as waste heat radiated by the panels. For nuclear powerplants, some 2 units of waste heat are produced per unit of electric energy.
So SPS is far more environmentally benign than ground based solar. It is better from a mining impact perspective as well, since SPS has capacity factor close to 100%. The panels are therefore 4-10x more productive than ground based solar, implying a similar reduction in mineral requirements. Nothing can expand forever of course. The Earth has heat limits that cannot be obviated.
I still think that launching these things from Earth is not the best way to go. With Artemis aiming at a permanent human presence on the moon, we should be working on lunar mining and mass driver technology. But that can be an evolutionary improvement that we enact later on.
” For every 1W”
If you think about it, virtually all the energy from a power satellite turns to heat. It is just the physics.
“polysilicon”
Production is 1.4 million tons per year. Coal production is 8,000 million tons. It is a rather small fraction of coal production.
The coal is all spoken for and used. There is no spare coal.
Maybe something will work. We need to keep trying because we humans are terribly dependent on external energy.
“terribly dependent on external energy.”
True. But if you count the sunlight that comes down on crop and pasture land, it is 1000 times as much as the energy we use for everything else.
Keith
you make it sound like theres a petrol pump at every field gate dispensing petrol for virtually nothing.
your calculator misses the point that the energy you mention, is diffuse.
humankind heeds concentrated fuel sources
“heeds concentrated fuel sources”
We used to use horses. They ate IIRC 20% of the crops. Today 10% of gasoline is alcohol from corn.
agreed Keith
but a horse ate grass, moved at 4mph and reproduced itself.
We burn alcohol (moonshine) to help us move at 70mph, and in doing so pay far more for our food.
we cannot run an industrial economic system on 10% of an agricultural base and expect it to deliver 100% of our liquid fuel needs.
farms run on diesel—it is madness to expend 100% diesel to get 10% of petrol in return
the difference is that the machine does not need to be fed when it is not working, and if 100% of the vegetable alcohol is intended for agriculture + a generalization of gardening, it is sustainable.
“not need to be fed when it is not working”
Horses would be more useful with an off switch.
Pets too.
“not a resource.”
It is a source of carbon though. If you have lots of excess renewable power and a low cost source of carbon, you can make diesel for around $20/bbl. The big problem is that we don’t make enough trash.
If we mined a little more coal, and shipped it (probably using oil) to the source of excess renewable energy, we could use it as a source of carbon. It is not clear that there would be a net gain in all of this, however.
“a net gain.”
That’s what engineering studies are for.
The closest landfill to where I live gets 9,000 tons of trash per day. Call it 4000 tons/day of carbon. An installation that made 34,000 bbl/day would need about 8500 tons of carbon, so it would need 4500 tons of coal per day additional. That is around 45 rail cars per day which is a modest amount and there is a nearby rail line. Vaporizing this about of carbon would be 8500/24 x 3 MW a little over a GW. If peak load was 3 times that, 3 GW, that just happens to be the capacity of the nearby Sylmar convertor station so the lines could handle it.
It is about 40 miles from the landfill to a Chevron refinery where they could process the gas into synthetic oil. There are several oil fields along the route. It would take considerable effort to decide if the oil fields were suitable to store months of syngas.
Figured at $200/bbl, $2.40/gal, the gross annual income would be ~2.5 B./year. The trash is free, the coal $40/ton ($66 million). The power would cost $175 million for the power at $20/MWh. Maintenance might double this number, still leaving $2B/year. For a 5 year return on capital, you could spend $10 B. The Sasol plant cost a billion, but that included a refinery. I wonder if there is an unused pipeline close to the 405 freeway. If not, pipelines are around 8 million dollars a mile.
Hmm.
(I had an AI look this over and it corrected the last number which I had too low.)
We don’t need more than the sun grants us daily. We just have forgotten to live with nature. We should better recover the skills of our ancestors than fighting for the last resources. It is a mental challenge!
problem is—our ancestors fought for resources too—just different resources.
Killing a mammoth for its ”energy resources” was no mean task to take on.
we have monetized the arrangement now, but the intention is still the same—our brains havent evolved since the stone age.
AI wont change that.
Norman, thank you for being one of the few with sensibility in regards to our challenges.
Gail provides the same in most cases ( she tends to downplay CC as far as I’m concerned; but I agree with her assessment, we can’t really do much about it).
Seems FE leaves and others step in his shoes.
That’s OK, Gail promotes different views
” farms run on diesel—it is madness to expend 100% diesel to get 10% of petrol in return ”
Tks Norm . I have been harping about all ” the product mix” from the refineries must be sold at many other forums . The populace is just ” energy illiterate ” . Grateful to Gail who allows those who understand our predicament to share ideas . When is your book due for publication ?
thanks ravi
my new book isn’t due out till June next year, but it’s a book on Industrial history (starting in 1709) based on the lives of the men who kicked it all off…..not politics this time.
My robot will do the hunting and butchering.
make sure your robot knows what it is hunting and butchering..
neighbors can be funny about that sort of thing
We do need more than the sun grants us daily if we want to live better than hunter gatherers or smelly worm ridden mediaeval peasants.
But wait Solar Power will save us after all https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-18/survey-of-the-worlds-solar-shows-global-boom/104006096
Our problem is that we don’t have an affordable way to store solar energy until we need its. This especially tends to be in the winter.
From the article:
United States
Each day as the sun sets, and the solar farms stop producing energy, there is a peak of demand in the evening as people get home from work.
This has been the time when dispatchable fossil fuels — specifically gas — have been crucial.
But another renewable technology is changing this.
In California’s grid — which has about 31 per cent of its power coming from solar — newly installed batteries are soaking up the excess power generated during the day.
And then they’re selling it back to the grid when demand rises in the evening.
“First, the solar came for the gas plants that ran all day,” says Jenny Chase. “And then batteries came for the evening peak.”
And while solar continues its march towards super-cheap, super-abundant energy generation during the day, it’s over to another technology to continue the clean-energy transition into the night.
“Solar was the disruption of last decade,” says Tim Buckley. “Batteries will be the disruption of this coming decade.”
But batteries still don’t fix the winter problem. We need natural gas or coal for heat and light in winter.
“for heat and light in winter.”
Or synthetic gas made from carbon and excess PV.
The whole problem is we don’t have any spare affordable ‘carbon’ lying around.
Yes solar + batteries work so a home or small farm can supply 85% of annual kW use . It can pay back current installed costs in ten years. Personal experience. Home heating or charging a car would require a doubling of solar costs but still doable in a warm sunny location like Calif. Many costs in Calif. are very high like price if gas or diesel, or cost of grid supplied electricity. A good solar battery system can lock in future energy costs , guessing what future fuel costs, or future grid supplied kW costs will be or whether those costs will inflate is the bet you make.Either way pay now or pay later and hedging your bets.
We have great experience with tiny island installations for a little light and radio in offgrid huts in the Alps, except for three months in winter.
A friend has just installed a grid installation of about 3sqm on a very sunny spot and has generated last month 1.5kWh. That is about a light bulb of 50W for not even one hour daily. An average flat for two is calculated here without heating costs (and electric car) with 3000kWh per year or 250kWh per months. He was desperate and called it lost money. To be able to generate this here in November, a panel area of 500sqm would be needed, and even more for car and heating.
How exactly does it work in the northern hemisphere? In the UK, there is 10x more sunshine in summer than in winter. Most of Europe is the same. Is that battery going to store power for 6 months? Or do we have to save high consumption activities for summer?
imagine if our lives were based on intermittent energy it could be done with ai’s help and a universal basic income a slow society forget electric cars let us use electric bikes and scooters instead i can easily afford that.
” use electric bikes and scooters”
There are places like LA where that would work. It would not work a good part of the time in Chicago or Toronto.
And you would have to put up with a lot of injuries.
I ride a bike in snow and ice . I heat with wood but have a small house American culture is fat and lazy there I said it but it’s true! They will drive to a gym to ride a stationary bike and walk to nowhere instead of working in a garden. In America you hear people say that you need single level houses because they are too fat to climb stairs. Exercise is what makes you strong!
In America they have electric buggies for fatties to ride on in Walmart in case they have a heart attack shopping.
Sounds like you are a priviliged person?
In most European cities the working class commutes 2x1hr per day by public transport – you hardly do that with a bike in rain and snow.
In the Alps here the next larger city is 35kms far and the altitude difference is 1000m. It is impossible to do that twice a day! A motorbike or an e-roller is very dangerous in winter, as there are parts to cross with 4-5 months of snow per year. The only possibility is by car or by bus.
As a university professor you might be able to afford a nice space in close reach to your workplace. The majority of blue collars here does not earn enough to live close to where they work. And the large factories outside the cities do not provide living space.
See, even if these elite rich types find away for life extension…life strikes at any time
Isak Andic: Billionaire Mango founder plummets to death, falls from cliff while hiking
Max Corstorphan
A billionaire fashion tycoon has died after reportedly falling over 100m when he slipped off a cliff while hiking.
Isak Andic, founder of the popular fashion brand Mango was hiking in near Barcelona when he is understood to have fallen.
A police spokesperson said Mr Andic was exploring the Montserrat caves when the tragedy occurred.
Shortly after 1pm on Saturday, local time, authorities were called.
Specialised crews and a rescue helicopter raced to the area, however Mr Andic was discovered dead.
Current Mango chief executive Toni Ruiz said: “His departure leaves a huge void but all of us are, in some way, his legacy and the testimony of his achievements.”
“It is up to us to ensure that Mango continues to be the project that Isak was ambitious and proud of.”
Mr Andic has a net worth of $7 billion according to Forbes.
So, now that I’m nearing the big 70 in a few years, I’ve noticed certain activities might not be advisable, such as above….but to each his own…my balance and endurance isn’t like it was just a few years ago. I’ll stick to trotting and walking in the golf courses…but that ain’t a guarantee something won’t kill you.
Golfer brutally beaten to death with clubs at course in Palm Beach Gardens: Cops
Junior Boucher, 36, of West Palm Beach, is facing a first-degree murder charge in the killing of Brian Hiltebeitel, 65, an arrest report said
By Brian Hamacher • Published November 26, 2024 • Updated on November 27, 2024 at 7:18 am
Hiltebeitel yelled “he’s trying to kill me” multiple times and at one point, both men fell to the ground and Boucher started hitting Hiltebeitel multiple times with the golf club, the report said.
The two separated and Boucher retrieved another golf club and again chased Hiltebeitel towards the pond at hole one, the report said.
Seems the attacker claimed he was possessed with evil spirits of some sort, only in Florida
Their wives and heirs would smile
or more like the have nots are attacking the haves of society.
In my own experience, meat prices have *not* gone up appreciably, despite the US cattle herd being its smallest in a while, according to headlines. This could help explain it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAVJADCljRU
More global demand for beef is being met by Brazil, so USA can keep more of its own production.
Kevin Walemsky says that food prices in general, are down rather than up. (Historically, they have risen and fallen with oil prices. Oil prices are on the low side also.) It is hard to US farmers to plan.
Also, he says that China is getting more of its food imports from Russia and Brazil.
That is why the Chinese company invested in Brazil . Brazil has what China needs viz food . Soya , orange concentrate , coffee ,beef , timber etc . China wants to avoid the US as any source because of the hostile attitude . Several years ago I read a book ” Who will feed China ” by Lester Brown . I remember during the covid year the slaughter houses in Benelux were overwhelmed with orders of pork from China .
I suppose it is a reaction on falling demand. To look just at the price development might be misleading, if the food budget is declining. It also depends, if high quality organic foods or industrial foods are analysed, as the later have a much larger elasticity.
Which means a collapse of chinese ecpnpmy will keep beef consumption low
Hiccup on the way to a H economy. Note this truck is at a Pt mine, damn hard to get that cubic mile of Pt.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/first-mode-files-for-bankruptcy-in-sudden-downfall-for-clean-trucking-company/ar-AA1w2cYu?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=9e9c62d68db847f6909c2bd821ccccb6&ei=51
Only option is mining space at this point and with industrial production declining it will be a heck of a race.
Dennis L.
First Mode files for bankruptcy in sudden downfall for clean tech company
Under photo:
The company tried to find a buyer, but couldn’t find one. It will be wound down.
A race losr already. Nothing has beem started.
“Only option is mining space at this point and with industrial production declining it will be a heck of a race.”
I am not sure we need a lot of platinum, at least not for making hydrogen. Assuming that method of using carbon, steam and intermittent power works, we can make diesel and jet fuel out of carbon containing trash and coal.
The conversion factor is ~4 bbl of diesel per ton of carbon. Municipal waste is about 290 million tons per year or .8 million tons per day. About 40% of that is carbon, so around .32 million tons per day, which would make about 1.3 million bbl per day. That’s consistent with an analysis I did 20 years ago on a trash procession plant in Canada.
Oil use in the US is around 20 million bbl/day which would take about 5 million tons per day of carbon (.21 million tons per hr). Unless we could increase the trash, most of the carbon would need to come from coal.
There is perhaps 50 years of trash in landfills that could be mined and fed to the synthetic diesel plants. Mined out in ten years, this would push up production to around 7.7 million bbs/day without coal which is ~1/3 of current demand.
Carbon takes 3 MWh/ton to make syngas. To vaporize .21 million tons per hour would need a power input of 625 GW, on intermittent power a peak of 3 times that. (US installed capacity is 1161 GW so this would take an enormous expansion of renewable power.)
The stored syngas could be tapped to run combustion turbines when solar PV fails.
Of course going to electric cars would considerably cut the oil demand, but long distant air travel, farming, and heavy trucks need jet fuel and diesel.
We don’t have to mine asteroids for platinum though it is a good idea and will make someone a mountain of money.
Undifferentiated trash in a landfill is not a resource.
and think of the energy input needed to burrow into the landfill in the first place and extract whats in there
most plastic now is intended to be biodegradable anyway, and apart from plastic itself theres very little else in concentrated form to make it worthwhile
wacky idea
“wacky idea”
If you have a better one, tell us.
there isn’t one—-wacky or not.
we have consumed our cheap energy surpluses over the last 300 years.
humankind can only exist by converting one energy form into another (just as all living things do)
as long as more energy is available than is necessary to support our accustomed lifestyle—we live.
when there isnt enough for us, we die off until the balance is restored…..no gods are going to alter the laws of physics for our convenience.
burrowing into landfill sites to keep the system going is slightly less wacky than mining the moon or asteroids, or putting in a hypersonic transport tube across the atlantic, but no less futile.—–we have to expend more and more energy to get less and less in return.
British Mail is sold to Czech billionaire . What is next ? Buckingham Palace . 🤣
https://rmx.news/article/uk-government-approves-sale-of-royal-mail-to-czech-billionaire-daniel-kretinsky/
The Ambanis or some other billionaire from India would want that
USA styles itself as the chief Western Country but right from start it had a group of population which eventually proved to be unassimilable.
Trump is just a final chance to stop USA’ descent into a non Western country as those who have nothing to do with Western Civilization will outnumber those who had something to with it in near future.
USA, Canada and ANZ are what learned people might call ‘half-Western’ country, like Russia. Russia has ceased to be a Western country; USA claimed it led the West for 110 years but it is now ending as well.
And the nonWestern countries won’t be able to hold civilization intact, returning back to Eastern Despotism.
democracy is held together by mutual prosperity
nothing else
if that prosperity devolves into wide disparity, democracy will collapse.
(and I dont mean maybe)
I am afraid you are right.
4 ” non – banana ” republics govt collapses in a week . France , Germany , South Korea and Canada . So who is next ? UK premier’s rating are down in the dung heap .
i deliberately didnt put a time factor on it ravi—because that is impossible to guess at.
the only certainty is that wide disparity will bring about collapse in the end.
Take Russia.
the disparity between the tsars and the common people was enormous, and brought about the revolution, but that resulted in someone worse, so effectively the Russian revolution is still going on, because Putin is still exerting the same power the tsars did—albeit in a slightly different way.
i dont think it will end well.
When the USA tips into wide enough disparity (not there yet), with the country run for the benefit of the ultra rich the end result will be the same. There will be no MAGA,only mass poverty, and then violent insurrection…..probably regional at first, then the whole country.
that won’t end well either.
Musk et al think wealth buys security—it ultimately doesn’t. Wealth depends on collective prosperity—not individuals.
Austria currently discusses to cut social welfare for migrants and asylum seekers.
if migrants are in a country, and become vagrants, they will group together to take what they need to survive
its called human nature
Places where the temperature never gets too cold, and there is enough water have an advantage over other parts of the world economy when it comes to sustainability. Until fossil fuels became available, heating in winter was at best a luxury for a few rich people. Indoor plumbing won’t work, if the temperature inside of a home drops below freezing much.
The huge amount of fossil fuels that need to be burned to provide heat in winter provide an extra layer of costs in cold parts of the world. If air conditioning is used in summer, this adds another layer of costs. These costs make goods more expensive to produce. Goods become too expensive to export. In fact, they become too expensive for the current population, without abundant fossil fuels.
European dwellings were built so that stables and dwellings communicated. The heat from the stable kept the house warm and also gave odors to the houses. These could also be very populated, have deep cellars very stable in terms of temperature and the construction methods favored insulation.
European castles seem not to have been heated. Medieval fashion favour a multi-layer look, aiming for warmths.
Farmhouses kept cattle and man under the same roof, heated by thick layers of manure. While there were separated rooms for the farmer and the female staff, the male workers slept close to the cattle or in the hay.
In the Alps survival without fire is impossible, but there is enough firewood, if access is not restricted as currently.
When traveling (Russia or Eastern Europe), we saw homes that were built as a second story, above animals and their manure on the first story. We were told that the animals and their manure helped provide at least a little heat to homes.
This may have been a historical display, not necessarily current practice.
Anglais
It is indeed a historical practice, but it has disappeared very recently. Even without manure, cows give off a crazy amount of heat. I had an experience of this in the army. When we went on marches, we often slept in the stables, and often in the very high mountains. It was in December and January 1982, there was a lot of snow and it was very cold. We were sent to clear the villages too. We did not suffer from the cold in these stables, only from the noise. Cows are always moving. The bitches.
Australia is the source of the story behind the song, “Three dog night.” At least some group in Australia slept with their dogs for warmth. If a night was particularly cold, it was a “Three dog night.”
If the Dems didn’t shit itself badly and Gopalan were a half decent candidate, the whole thing would have ended with Hordes Victories by end of the year.
Trump’s victory is a compromise by the West, to salvage whatever it could and buy a bit more time, something poorly understood by most people.
So the Russians and Iranians gave up Syria as a compromise so Israel would cease hostilities, and relative peace would reign for a few years.
Democracy and giving those who have no stake on civilization a say about how things are run will end. With a vengeance.
The economic and technological disparity is so severe that today’s winners and the rest are separate species for all practical purposes, and a complete separation and an eternal exclusion of 99% of world’s pop from all decision processes is inevitable.
You might be right.
I guess we have always said BAU until 2030 looks like we will be barley able to make it
Bau forever!
Gail’s graph of industrial output is consistent with this.
Dennis L.
U.S. Shale Nears Limits of Productivity Gains
Natural depletion in shale reservoirs is signaling the end of rapid growth.
Despite advancements like AI driving cost reductions and improving well output, there are physical and technological limits to shale production.
Declining prime acreage and natural reservoir limits suggest that U.S. shale’s production growth peak is near.
“Some would explain this with weakening demand, even though the oil demand growth trajectory remains on an upward curve despite apocalyptic predictions. A more likely reason for the EIA data—besides the devastating impact of pandemic lockdowns on demand—is natural depletion in some fields that offset stronger-than-expected growth in others.
U.S. shale producers are doing more with less, which has become something of their modus operandi in the past few years. Yet natural depletion is one fact of life that no one can change, and this fact of life means that as drillers run out of prime acreage and move on to relatively lower-quality reservoirs, production growth peak is on the horizon, as oilfield veteran David Messler wrote for Oilprice last year. Efficiency gains are certainly important—especially for investors who expect a steady stream of returns—but like everything else, these can’t last forever.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/The-Imminent-Peak-In-Permian-Oil-What-Does-it-Mean-For-Investors.html
From the article;
*(“Some would explain this with weakening demand, even though the oil demand growth trajectory remains on an upward curve despite apocalyptic predictions)
That’s exactly what I thought when I read about the World Bank and IEA saying “Largest oil glut in 200 years coming next year”
That IS an apocalyptic prediction.
This is an article from July 2023, forecasting what will happen in late 2024. In fact, this does seem to be what is happening: Oil production from the Permian seems to be leveling off. In fact, oil production in total seems to be leveling off.
https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/production/#oil-tab
Could it be because of the price pressure… that it is not profitable that’s why oil giants have been getting out?
Exactly! The reason that the oil giants get out is because the price doesn’t rise high enough. People assume that scarcity leads to high price, but it doesn’t. It leads to a missing middle class, and lower demand.
And I guess the world falls into a slow depression where demand keeps falling
Relatively low prices and falling demand might fuel interests in a major war, I am afraid.
Oh well, we’re just going to have to adapt on living with the change.
It works until it doesn’t, Gail here.
Anyway, Rex Tillerson once said those words matter of factly in regards to humans..it’s what we do….adapt to whatever, climate, ect
Yes, Gail feels there may be people still around, living together, but not in this BAU, how nice
I’m old now, my adapting days are over, that’s for the youngsters…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mp8rct9D75M
Bill Gates is lobbying Senators to destroy the Epstein list. Gates and the Senate to protect pedophiles.
From the picture Bill Clinton likes the little girls. Does Bill Gates like the little girls or the little boys?
He wants to be seen like someone who can push the next vaccine, not the pedofile he is. I know I know..
Bill Gates was always CREEPY and a sly SOB.
Remember watching a TV episode on how he was setting up his partner to screw him out of his share of their evil Empire MS…He was caught, thank goodness, when confronted and had no choice but to say he e wa sorry (that is sorry he was caught).
NOT TO BE TRUSTED..he looks like a worm and is a nasty WORM…
Bill Gates betrayed his ailing business partner and tried to deprive him of his share of the Microsoft fortune, according to a scathing memoir from Paul Allen, the company’s billionaire co-founder.
Allen portrays the Microsoft mogul as a sarcastic bully who tried to force his founding partner out of the firm and to cut his share in the company as he was recovering from cancer. The book, Idea Man: a Memoir by the co-founder of Microsoft, is set to go on sale on 17 April, and an extract appears in May’s Vanity Fair magazine and has been released online.
That’s just one of many examples of his dirty deeds.
Read his wife left him because of his “friendship” with Epstein…
He’ll probably live to be a very old geezer and look like
this in the
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mXM9EpdkrVY&pp=ygUlQWN0b3IgcGxheWluZyBUaWJlcml1cyBrbiBiY2NUaWJlcml1cw%3D%3D
The particular entity may be killing people with a smile and working with state capitalists, oligarchs and outside agitators to extract the last bit of value and humanity before the collapse but as long as the individual or group accepts climate change, degrowth and is not a right wing populist they get a pass.
It is as much a horror for the little boys as it is for little girls. It is less about sex but a huge disbalance of power. A sadistic program. Children play a huge part in sexual magic, too. I would suspect, that the main victims are not girls at the age of 17 but much, much smaller.
Yes, the leadership of the west is extremely sick, satanic, evil.
There is a real fear that information about this Epstein list will be released after January 20. Those with money/power would like the evidence destroyed, now.
Interesting, the voters of the Dems support immunity for Fauci or the destruction of the Epstein list! It should provoke some protest, right?
Not sure Trump was a good friend of Epstein so probably won’t see anything. Of course Trump was a democrat until he repackaged himself. I wonder what the democrats are going to repackage themselves after this election
There is a joke from the 80s Czechoslovakia, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the prices started to skyrocket. It is based on a humorous extension of the communist addressing the people by the then Czechoslovak president Gustav Husák. It says in Czech:
Drazí soudruzi, drahé soudružky, drahé všechno!
Which translates as:
Dear comrades, dear comradesses, expensive everything!
As you can see, it is a gender based joke.
I would modify this joke a bit to get a few more laughs of recognition out of the English speakers:
Dear comrades, dear comradesses, dear everything!
Yes, everything is becoming dear.
Fighting increasingly more and more physical forces of the nature is simply unsustainable. That is how humans fail and other species prevail.
There is always survival of the best adapted. Even if the physical forces of nature increase, there are likely to be some people who are able to work around the latest issues. They may be hunter-gatherers, in some remote area.
We know that humans (and pre-humans) made it through the ice ages. The bigger brains of humans seem to provide a long-lasting benefit. These bigger brains developed after humans learned to cook some food. This advantage remains.
It is doubtful that there will be enough food for all of us, but there will be enough food from some of us. Economies operate in cycles. The exception would seem to be a Biblical type event, providing a different ending for humans.
From Charles Hugh Smith
https://charleshughsmith.substack.com/p/all-three-pillars-holding-up-the
All Three Pillars Holding Up the Economy Have Cracked
All three pillars propping up workforce spending are cracking. Plan accordingly.
He gives these three ways to temporarily work around the limit:
None of these are sustainable. In fact, we are already having problems with them.
“Most importantly, inflation-adjusted wage growth has been strongest for the lowest-income workers, whose real wages are 16 percent higher than they were before the pandemic.* Wage growth for low-income working Americans has been so much stronger than for other groups that it has led to a decline in wage inequality, undoing roughly one-third of its growth since 1980—right before Ronald Reagan became president.”?
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/americans-wages-are-higher-than-they-have-ever-been-and-employment-is-near-its-all-time-high/
All of this wage growth of low income Americans is the result of growing government debt. It is this government debt growth that seems to be unsustainable.
What we seem to be losing now is middle income jobs. We have only high wages and quite low wages, when inflation in the price of basics is considered.
The cost of credit is still cheap, when compared to inflation.
We don’t know how long asset bubbles can go on. If governments remain in power, they would seem to opt for hyperinflation over deflation. The risk would seem to be overthrown governments, breaking of governments into smaller units, and new currency replacing the old currency.
Thank you.
Dennis L.
Any overthrow of the U.S. government would have to come from within. Civilians, even very wealthy ones do not have access to technology that could challenge the U.S. military. It is really poor countries with limited military technology that are vulnerable to being overthrown. U.S. and NATO can force their devalued currencies to be accepted through the use of military force or economic sanctions and extend credit until they lose their technological edge.