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I predict that the world economy will shrink in the next 10 years. I think that this is bound to happen because of energy and debt limits the world economy is hitting. There are a variety of other factors involved, as well.
In this post, I will try to describe the physics-based limits that the economy is facing, related to diminishing returns of many kinds. The problem we are facing has sometimes been called “limits to growth,” or “overshoot and collapse.” Such changes tend to lead to a loss of “complexity.” They are part of the way economies evolve. I would also like to share some ideas on the changes that are likely to occur over the coming decade.
[1] The world economy is a tightly integrated physics-based system, which is experiencing diminishing returns in far more areas than just oil supply.
When extraction of a mineral takes place, usually the easiest (and cheapest) portion of the mineral deposit is extracted first. After the most productive portion is removed, the cost of extraction gradually increases. This process is described as “diminishing returns.” Generally, more energy is required to extract lower quality ores.
The economy is now reaching diminishing returns in many ways. All kinds of resources are affected, including fossil fuels, uranium, fresh water, copper, lithium, titanium, and other minerals. Even farmland is affected because with higher population, more food is required from a similar amount of arable land. Additional-cost efforts such as irrigation can increase food supply from available arable land.
The basic problem is two-fold: rising population takes place while the easiest to extract resources are depleting. The result seems to be Limits to Growth, as modeled in the 1972 book, “The Limits to Growth.” Academic research shows that problems such as those modeled (sometimes referred to as “overshoot and collapse”) have been extremely common throughout history.
Precisely how this problem unfolds varies according to the specifics of each situation. Growing debt levels and increasing wage disparity are common symptoms before collapse. Governments become vulnerable to losses in war and to being overthrown from within. Epidemics tend to spread easily because high wage disparity leads to poor nutrition for many low-wage workers. Dr. Joseph Tainter, in his book, “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” describes the situation as the loss of complexity, as a society no longer has the ability to support some of the programs it previously was able to support.
At the same time the existing economy is failing, the beginnings of new economies can be expected to start. In some sense, economies “evolve,” just as plants and animals evolve. New economies will eventually replace existing ones. These changes are a necessary part of evolution, caused by the physics of the biosphere.
In physics terms, economies are dissipative structures, just as plants, animals, and hurricanes are dissipative structures. All dissipative structures require energy supplies of some type(s) to grow and remain away from a dead state. These structures do not “live” endlessly. Instead, they come to an end and are often replaced by new, slightly different, dissipative structures.
[2] Over the next 10 years, the general direction of the economy will be toward contraction, rather than growth.
There are many indications that the world economy is hitting a turning point because of rising population and diminishing returns with respect to resource extraction. For example:
[a] Debt levels are very high in the US and other countries. A rising debt level can temporarily be used to pull an economy forward without adequate energy supplies because it indirectly gives workers and businesses more spendable income. This income can be used to work around the lack of inexpensive energy products of the preferred types in a variety of different ways:
- It can allow consumers to afford a higher price for existing energy products, if the additional funds get back to customers as higher incomes or lower taxes.
- It can allow businesses to find more efficient ways of using resources, such as ramping up international trade or building more efficient vehicles.
- It can allow the development of new energy products, such as nuclear power generation and electricity from wind and solar.
What we are finding now is that these new approaches tend to encounter bottlenecks of their own. For example, oil supply is sufficiently constrained that the current level of international trade no longer seems to be feasible. Also, wind and solar don’t directly replace oil; electricity based on wind turbines and solar panels can lead to blackouts. Furthermore, diminishing returns with respect to oil and other resources tends to get worse over time, leading to a need for ever more workarounds.
If at some point, extraction becomes more constrained and workarounds fail to provide adequate relief, added debt will lead to inflation rather than to hoped-for economic growth. Higher inflation is the issue that many advanced economies have been struggling with recently. This is an indication that the world has hit limits to growth.
[b] Because of low oil prices, companies are deciding to cut back new investments in extracting oil from shale, and likely elsewhere.
Figure 1 shows that oil prices rise and fall; they don’t rise endlessly. They rose after US oil production hit its first limits in 1970, but this was worked around by ramping up oil production elsewhere. Prices rose in the 2003 to 2008 period and then fell temporarily due to recession. They returned to a higher level in 2011 to 2013, but they have settled at a lower level since then.
One factor in the price decline since 2013 has been the production of US shale oil, adding to world oil supply. Another factor has been growing wage disparity, as workers from rich countries have indirectly begun to compete with workers from low-wage countries for many types of jobs. Low-wage workers cannot afford cars, motorcycles, or long-distance vacations, and this affordability issue is holding down oil demand.
US oil production from shale is in danger of collapsing during the next few years because prices are low, making new investment unprofitable for many producers. In fact, current prices for oil from shale are lower than shown on Figure 1, partly because US prices are a little lower than Brent, and partly because prices have fallen further in 2025. The recent price available for US WTI oil is only about $62 per barrel.
[c] World per capita coal production has fallen since 2014. A recent problem has been low prices.
Transportation costs are a major factor in the delivered price of coal. The reduced production of coal is at least partly the result of coal mines near population centers getting mined out, and the high cost of transporting coal from more distant mines. Today’s coal prices do not seem to be high enough to accommodate the higher costs relating to diminishing returns.
[d] In theory, added debt could be used to prop up oil and coal prices, but debt levels are already very high.
Besides the problem with inflation, mentioned in point [a], there are problems with debt levels becoming unmanageably high.
Figure 3 shows US government debt as a ratio to GDP. If we look at the period since 2008, there was an especially large increase in debt at the time of the 2007-2009 Financial Crisis and the 2020 Pandemic. The debt level has become so high that interest on the debt is likely to require tax revenue to rise endlessly. The underlying problem is needing to pay interest on the huge amount of outstanding debt.
Putting together [a], [b], [c], and [d], the world has a huge problem. As the world economy is currently organized, it is heavily dependent on both oil and coal. Oil is heavily used in agriculture and in transportation of all kinds (cars, trucks, trains, airplanes, and ships). Coal is especially used in steel and concrete making, and in metal refining. We don’t have direct replacements for coal and oil for these uses. Wind and solar are terribly deficient at their current state of development.
The laws of physics tell us that, given the world’s current infrastructure, a reduction in the availability of both crude oil and coal will lead to cutbacks in the production of many kinds of goods and services around the world. Thus, we should expect that GDP will contract, perhaps for a long period, until workarounds for our difficulties can be developed. Today’s wind turbines and solar panels cannot solve the problem for many reasons, one of which is that fact that production and transport of these devices is dependent upon coal and oil supplies.
Thus, without adequate oil and coal to meet the needs of the world’s growing population, the world economy is being forced to gradually contract.
[3] Overall living standards can be expected to fall rather than rise during the next decade.
A recent article in the Economist shows the following chart, based on an analysis by the United Nations:
Figure 4 shows the trend in the Human Development Index as level in 2023-24. I expect that the trend will gradually shift downward in 2024-2025 and beyond. Modern advances, such as the availability of potable water in homes and the availability of electricity 24 hours per day, will become increasingly less common.
The Economist article displaying Figure 4 notes that, so far, most of the drop in living standards has happened in the poorer countries of the world. These countries were hit harder by Covid restrictions than rich countries. For example, the drop in tourism had a greater impact on less advanced countries than on rich countries. Poor countries were also affected by a decline in export orders for luxury clothing.
Outside of poor countries, young people are already finding it difficult to find jobs that pay well. They are often burdened with debt relating to advanced education, making it difficult for them to have the same standard of living that their parents had. This trend is likely to start hitting older citizens, as well. Jobs will be available, but they won’t pay well. This problem will affect both young and old.
[4] Governments will be especially vulnerable to cutbacks.
History shows that when overshoot and collapse occur, governments are likely to experience severe difficulties, indirectly because many of their citizens are getting poorer. They require more government programs, but if wages tend to be low, the taxes they pay tend to be low, too.
Unfortunately, the kinds of cutbacks being undertaken by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are very much necessary to get payments by the US government down to a level that can be supported by taxes. Regardless of how successful the current DOGE program is, I expect a huge reduction in the number of individuals on the payroll of the US government, perhaps by 50% to 75%, in the next 10 years. I also expect major cutbacks in the funding for outside organizations, such as universities and the many organizations DOGE has targeted.
At some point, the US government will need to reduce or eliminate many types of benefit payments made now. One approach might be to try to send many kinds of programs, such as job loss protection, Medicaid, and Medicare, back to the states to handle. Of course, the states would also have difficulty paying for these benefits without huge tax increases.
[5] Ten years from now, universities and colleges will enroll far fewer students.
I expect that university enrollments will fall by as much as 75% over the next 10 years, partly because government funding for universities is expected to fall. With less funding, tuition and fees are likely to be even higher than they are today. At the same time, jobs for university graduates that pay well will become less available. These considerations will lead fewer students to enroll in four-year programs. Shorter, more targeted education teaching specific skills are likely to become more popular.
There will still be some high-paying jobs available, requiring university degrees. One such area may be in finding answers to our energy and resource problems. Such research will likely be carried out by a smaller number of researchers than are active today because some current areas of research will be discarded as having too little potential benefit relative to the cost involved. Any approach considered will need to succeed with, at most, a tiny amount of government funding.
High paying jobs may also be available to a few students who plan to be the “wheeler-dealers” of the world. Some of these wheeler-dealer types will want to be the ones founding companies. Others will want to run for public office. They may be able to succeed, as well. They may want to study specialized tracks to advance their career goals. Or they may want to choose institutions where they can make contacts with people who can help them in pursuing their career goals.
For most young people, I expect that four-year university degrees will increasingly be viewed as a waste of time and money.
[6] In a shrinking economy, debt defaults will become an increasing problem.
A growing economy is very helpful in allowing financial institutions to prosper. With growth, future earnings of businesses tend to be higher than past earnings. These higher earnings make it possible repay both the borrowed amount and the required interest. With growth, there is little need to lay off employees. Thus, the employees have a reasonable chance to repay mortgage loans and car loans according to agreed-upon terms.
If an economy is shrinking, overhead becomes an ever-larger share of total revenues. This makes profits harder to achieve and may make it necessary to lay off employees. These laid-off employees are more likely to default on their outstanding loans. As debt defaults rise, interest rates charged by lenders tend to rise to compensate for the greater default risk. The higher interest rates make debt repayment for future borrowers even more difficult.
All these issues are likely to lead to financial crises, as debt defaults become more common.
[7] As debt defaults rise, banks tend to fail. This can lead to hyperinflation or deflation.
In a shrinking economy, the big question when banks fail is, “Will governments bail out the banks?”
If governments bail out the failing banks, there is a tendency toward inflation because the bailouts increase the money supply available to citizens, but not the quantity of goods available for purchase. If enough banks fail, the tendency may be toward hyperinflation–way too much money available to purchase very few goods and services.
If no government bailouts are available, the tendency is toward deflation. Without bailouts, the problem is that fewer banks are available to lend to citizens and businesses. As a result, fewer people can afford to buy homes and vehicles using debt, and fewer businesses can take out loans to purchase needed supplies. These changes lead to less demand for finished goods. This change in demand can indirectly be expected to affect commodity prices, as well, including oil prices. With low prices, some suppliers may go out of business, making any supply problem worse.
Regardless of whether bailouts are attempted or not, on average, citizens can be expected to be getting poorer and poorer as time goes on. This occurs because with a shrinking economy, fewer goods and services will be made. Unless the population shrinks at the same rate, individual citizens will find themselves getting poorer and poorer.
[8] Expect more tariffs and more conflicts among countries.
Without enough oil for transportation, the quantity of imported goods must be cut back. A tariff is a good way of doing this. If one country starts raising tariffs, the temptation is for other countries to raise tariffs in return. Thus, the overall level of tariffs can be expected to rise in future years.
Without enough goods and services for everyone to maintain their current standard of living, there will be a definite tendency for more conflict to occur. However, I doubt that the result will be World War III. For one thing, the West seems to have inadequate ammunition to fight a full-scale conventional war. For another, the nuclear bombs that are available are valuable for providing fuel for our nuclear power plants. It makes no sense to use them in war.
[9] Expect an increasing share of empty shelves, as time goes on.
High tech goods are especially likely to disappear from shelves. Replacement parts for automobiles may also be difficult to find, especially before an aftermarket of locally manufactured parts appears.
[10] Interest rates are likely to stay at their current level or increase to a higher level.
The high level of borrowing by governments and others makes lenders reluctant to lend unless the interest rates are high. It should also be noted that current interest rates are not high relative to historical standards. The world has been spoiled in recent years with artificially low interest rates, made possible by Quantitative Easing and other manipulations.
[11] Clearly, this list is not exhaustive.
The world economy has gone through two major disruptions in recent years, one in 2008, and one in 2020. Very unusual changes such as these are quite possible again.
We don’t know how soon new economies will begin to evolve. Eric Chaisson, a physicist who has researched this issue, says that there is a tendency for ever more complex, energy-dense systems to evolve over time. This would suggest that an even more advanced economy may be possible in the future.
Note: I am also publishing this post on Substack. At this point, it is still sort of an experiment. Comments sometimes don’t post well on WordPress. This will give readers a different option for viewing posts. Using Substack, my posts may reach a new audience as well.
Some of you may receive an email about my Substack post. I put in some email addresses back in January 2024 when I put up a post on Substack earlier. Subscriptions will continue to be free both places. This is a direct link to my new post. https://gailtverberg.substack.com/p/economic-contraction-coming-right
I see all these talk about new tech being moot as the Hordes are about to overwhelm the West.
People like Scott Ritter were arguing that Russia had won for months , and if the west (read: USA) cannot impose its will over there, then it has lost.
I wonder why all the previous regimes all pandered to Russia, when it should have been broken into a thousand pieces years ago.
All these zombie movies are actually allusions to the eastern hordes, about to overwhelm the west and end all the tech bs once for all.
“I wonder why all the previous regimes all pandered to Russia, when it should have been broken into a thousand pieces years ago.”
Possibly because neither Napoleon or Hitler were able to defeat Russia. The Russians are very nationalistic and you don’t want to provoke a Nuclear power who fears an existential threat to its survival. In other words if we no longer exist, neither will you.
He is drinking the western koolaid, that they can impose their will whenever they want on whomever they want. If they could not win in 1918, how could they win in 1992?
Germany actually Won in 1917
Woody Wilsom thought the Poles, the Czechs etc had to have countries of their oen
And 100 years later we know it was not a good idea after all
There were plenty of chances to dismantle Russia from 1991 to around 2016. Until Russia developed the hypersonic missiles, it could do nothing against Western advances.
As late as 2010 there was one, 1, single corps between Warsaw and Moscow. I believe it was a remnant of the 8th Guard Army, formerly 62nd Army, which gained fame in Stalingrad and was later part of the forces which were to attack the West in a war against Nato.
Until the hypersonic missiles, there was a very good chance to erase Russia from the map by simply encouraging its Asian regions to strike against Kremlin.
Niall Ferguson of the Hoover Institute has an interesting research article related to the US high level of interest payments relative to defense spending. “This paper proposes “Ferguson’s Law,” which states, “Any great power that spends more on debt servicing than on defense risks ceasing to be a great power.”
https://www.hoover.org/research/fergusons-law-debt-service-military-spending-and-fiscal-limits-power
https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/research/docs/HAHWGWorkingPaper-212502-Ferguson%27s%20Law-Final.pdf
Ferguson’s Law: Debt Service, Military Spending, and the Fiscal Limits of Power
He remarks that inflation seems to go along with hitting debt limits, as economies try to inflate their way out of debt problems.
He also says in the paper:
In conclusion, he says:
The solution to this is, of course, more defense spending.
Empires cannot be in debt to subjugated states or to their enemies. That is precisely what globalization has fostered in the American empire.
Good point!
They also can’t buy the materials that they need to make weapons from their enemy. I see this particularly applying to China.
Niall Ferguson is one of the people who hyped the potential for Covid to destroy civilization and thus the draconian response. Now this very same self-important a**-wipe coined the term “Fergusons’s Law”, because nothing he did was important enough for others to name after him, but he still wants to promote himself.
He is well known, however, and other people read what he writes.
I have a hard time believing that Artificial Intelligence will work in the way he hopes.
He claims that it is the comparison of defense spending to interest on debt that is important, instead of the overall level of debt. He gives a few examples, some of which are able to carry on for quite a while, despite higher interest payments than defense spending. I expect the situation is more complex. But there is always the question whether a country spends on “guns or butter.”
you can’t make this shit up. Sir Ferguson with the limited hangout for the walking dead liberals. With the eponymous no shit Sherlock law. The Hand’s got that mf on retainer.
Plus this law is not a law at all. it “risks” ceasing… what a childish thing he has written. Calling a law that is not a law and logically flawed after himself. I suggest a better Ferguson law: morons will be morons.
The Ferguson referred to in the law is a different one, Adam Ferguson, who wrote “An Essay on the History of Civil Society” in 1767. He touched on the issue of expenditures for war affecting the amount available to operate the rest of the economy.
Perhaps Adam was an ancestor of Niall. I don’t know. But the common name may have interested Niall.
Thx Gail.
Pingback: Three Days Later… – Revelation Six
Kevin Walmsley has a good post up called
Russia and China control the future of global nuclear power
https://kdwalmsley.substack.com/p/russia-and-china-control-the-future
Walmsley points out some of the things that I have noticed, but other things as well.
One thing I have said that he repeats:
One thing he points out is that to work around US sanctions, Russia is now exporting enriched uranium to China, and the US is buying it from China.
Another thing he points out is that China has found what seems to be a large deposit of uranium in Inner Mongolia, (which it controls).
He points out that US electricity prices are rising faster than general inflation, and are expect to continue to rise faster than inflation.
He says:
Of course, US and Europe aren’t partner countries.
It’s all noise imo. Those plants will never be finished. Two years from now all construction will be stopped. They’re just boondoggle bridges to nowhere. A nascent nuclear bubble piggybacking on the AI bubble. China hustling abroad because it’s domestic bubble is toast.
The next and final establishment will be rabidly anti-nuclear and rightly so. A nuclear Collapse is not an option.
Funny how this reminds me of a situation Robinson Crusoe encountered while stranded on his island. He decided to fell a huge tree and build a dug out canoe in the hopes he could start sailing around the island and maybe do some fishing.
When he had nearly finished, he suddenly realized he had no way of transporting it to the shore where he could launch it.
No man is an island but, due to a dislocation, sometimes we find ourselves as one such that laid plans go to waste. Just gotta keep grinding out an outcome. I know Robinson Crusoe’s plight all too well. Hindsight is always 20/20 to a babe in the woods.
The people who believe in nuclear — which is a loose end — also believe in stealing from the future in order to get it, which means that they are not interested in the future but only interested in their structural greed. The people who see the future because they live for a future based on ample lessons learned from the past, don’t believe in nuclear, and the Hand is still a scholar if not a gentleman. The Hand couldn’t be the Hand were it not a scholar. It’s poetic justice that the timing of the Hand’s emergent birth as the global shadow government also left it it stranded on an island with loose ends, like Crusoe and myself.
That was me, reante, above, with the fat finger.
https://peakprosperity.com/economic-collapse-approaches/
Excerpt: Economic Collapse Approaches
The US economy is on a collision course with geology and physics always wins. The reason is as old as recorded history; the humans in charge have the wrong story in their minds. Peak Oil is now a reality, but that hasn’t penetrated the decision-making halls of power, as evidenced by the headlong rush into power-gobbling data centers, and the passage of blow-out deficit spending bills.
its penetrated the decision making alright……
unfortunately any fool understands what the opposite of infinite growth means in real terms….
the most important aspect of any politicians job is keeping it, less than infinite growth means the politicos head.
It sounds like he is talking about some of the same things I am talking about. He puts part of it behind a paywall, however.
One thing I hadn’t run across before was EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook forecast for US crude oil and condensate. It goes downhill quite quickly.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/data/browser/#/?id=1-AEO2025®ion=0-0&cases=ref2025&start=2023&end=2050&f=A&sourcekey=0
‘Peak oil demand’ chart lol
They project crude+condensate production of 13.3mbpd this year and 13.6mbpd in 2028 before very gradual declines to 11mbpd in 2050. It seems there’s nothing to worry about.
The delusionist will ask his copilot who will give an answer no wiser than its questioner.
Wink’s as good as a nod
A different version of the Anti-Christ: Artificial Intelligence. This seems to fit in with what we were talking about yesterday, with the endless hallucinations of AI.
https://unherd.com/2025/05/peter-thiels-visions-of-apocalypse/
Peter Thiel’s visions of Apocalypse
Is AI the Antichrist?
I read an article a couple of days ago, which cited a poll, according to which 49% of the teenagers and young people surveyed, expressed the wish that they could have grown up in a world without the Internet.
Here it is:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/20/almost-half-of-young-people-would-prefer-a-world-without-internet-uk-study-finds
I find AI very useful, as a tutor it is great.
Dennis L.
dennis
with ai as your tutor—as i have said before—i’m glad you were not my dentist
Norman,
We all have our opinions, arguing with a narrative is mostly hopeless.
All the best,
Dennis L.
When companies do customer service, they are happy if the results are only sort of close to 100% right. If they can save a whole lot of money by using AI, they will switch, I am afraid.
AI can be trained on specific approaches for that company, I would think. This would seem to eliminate the problem of hallucinations. Of course, companies will not want AI giving money back to everyone with a problem, so it will need to monitor what it is doing carefully.
theil is part of the elders he is promoting ai.
From the Guardian, a British online newspaper.
“Switzerland is home to more than 370,000 nuclear bunkers – enough to shelter every member of the population. But if the worst should happen, would they actually work?”
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/may/29/why-does-switzerland-have-more-nuclear-bunkers-than-any-other-country
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“The entire time I was underground, it was impossible to shake off a latent sense of the absurd. The planning was exceptional, the engineering impressive; Swiss civil protection services thought of everything. But to house an entire nation underground for even a few days is akin to trying to colonise the moon. There are so many unknowns that even the most brilliant and thorough plans can easily fail.”
I guess with AI I’ll soon be able to build my own nuclear bunker in my back garden. Instead I’ll use it to build my own secret underground railway to the Galapagos Islands, so I can get cheap holidays. The whole system will be very green. There’ll only be a single carriage, and I’ll buy two husky dogs to pull it there and back. Sorted! Respect due.
The article talks about two kinds of bunkers. One kind is a small one, to be used by the inhabitants of a house. It might be used as a wine cellar, when not needed as a bunker. This is what it says about the larger bunkers:
A second type of bunker – command posts for civil protection and emergency personnel who manage operations – is designed for longer stays, and is equipped with showers, kitchenettes and internet access. In recent years, these command centres have been used, not without controversy, as overflow housing for refugees, asylum seekers and the homeless.
“This is what we wanted,” Jordi said of the bunkers’ extracurricular uses, “a system which is normally used, but when it comes to the worst, you can rather quickly change it into a protected room.” Current regulations require bunkers to be crisis-ready in less than five days. Of the notice period, Jordi said: “War does not happen tomorrow without any introduction.”
If these places are being used as overflow housing for the homeless and refugees, what does the country do?Just throw them out, when a crisis comes? If they don’t use them, keeping all parts of them up to date with internet access and everything else seems difficult.
Oh well, this just happened
What caused Switzerland’s glacier collapse?
In Switzerland, the mountainside gave way Wednesday near the village of Blatten, in the southern Lötschental valley, because the rock face above the Birch Glacier had become unstable when mountain permafrost melted, causing debris to fall and cover the glacier in recent years, said Martin Truffer, a physics professor …1 day ago
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/28/swiss-glacier-collapse-village-switzerland-blatten
They’ll bejustfi e hiding in those bunkers
“On the other hand, available nuclear bombs are valuable to power our nuclear plants”. This statement is absurd and discredits you. It is illegal and internationally monitored to use bomb materials to produce civilian electricity (see treaties such as the NPT).
The US has been down blending both bombs purchased from Russia for years, as well as its own bombs. This is where all of the old nuclear bombs have been disappearing to. This is a chart of what has happened to the inventory, as a result. The world is running out of nuclear bombs to down blend.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Estimated-Nuclear-Warhead-Inventories-1945-2023.png
How can you be so willfully ignorant? When something contradicts your beliefs and surprises you, the proper action is to verify that information before arguing with the site’s host and claiming they are discredited. You embarrass yourself.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/military-warheads-as-a-source-of-nuclear-fuel
>> Weapons-grade uranium and plutonium surplus to military requirements in the USA and Russia is being made available for use as civil fuel.
>> Highly-enriched uranium from weapons stockpiles has been displacing some 8850 tonnes of U3O8 production from mines each year, and met about 13% to 19% of world reactor requirements through to 2013.
Sorry, with the present cost of living crisis; which is more existential to most at present, I just couldn’t resist writing the first theme that popped into my mind. Maybe I’ve been in the kitchen too long.
When your warheads are getting old, to stop them ‘going off’, add some Himalayan salt and place them in a nuclear blender. Give them a quick wiz, throw out the subsequent radioactive residual butterfats into the cooling pond and make the rest into nuclear butter, because butter lasts longer and butter always butters better.😘
Maybe an even better solution would be to place warmongering politicians, military industrialists and lawyers in this type of fictional blender for trying to force the world into more conflict, instead of facing and admitting we have an energy crisis.
However the process might yield extremely rancid butter fats, and we’d become just as bad, adding too many other problems to the very real state of overshoot.
Better off sticking to…cheeses.
On a more serious note, I’m good with it, if cold butts in harsh winters or hot butts in sweltering summers; cause Ape-Kind to take the path of less resistance by breaking down warheads to provide and conserve energy and therein ‘by accident’ reduce the likelihood we totally annihilate ourselves. Some of us might get on with not starving to death and survive our actual existing crisis.
It must be so confusing to be a young person in 2025.
Turning warheads into nuclear fuel is worse for Collapse than just defusing the warheads. Warheads are shelf stable. Nuclear fuel assemblies are not.
Warheads are stable. Well maybe, but the radiation is the only thing with a long half life, not the nukes themselves.
Equally, Taking away a nuke detonator will not stop collapse or make something that’s radioactive inert, with respect; we’re not talking about noble gases here sorry reant.
And we can’t talk about something that exists as if will go away, or as if it wont be intentionally used to it’s originally intended effect.
Bombs were always meant for a purpose. The nuclear deterrent excuse is just that. Anyone who uses nukes is mad and any nation that have them is dangerous. The power of destruction has always been in the wrong hands.
We’re perhaps just complicit because we survived so long
No need to apologize: nuclear warheads in storage — even in neglected storage facilities — aren’t a going radiation concern when the grids go down unless maybe you’re hanging out in the overgrown parking lot. They just don’t emit much. Nuclear fuel assemblies are *the* going radiation concern when the grids go down so I see it as a bad trade (understatement) regardless of your concerns about nuclear war. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Yeah it must be really confusing being a young person right now.
I’m sure many OFW readers have seen this from ZH. Is China slowing down that much? And what exactly is its population? All I see on China Observer is that the malls, cities, and passenger trains are empty.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/china-drowing-soaring-coal-inventories-amid-sinking-power-demand-crashing-coal-price
This story just went up recently. It fits in with a lot of other things we have heard about China,
Low coal prices seem to be a huge problem for the Chinese economy. It means that coal production doesn’t pay well enough to cover all of the costs involved. Profits of coal companies have been cut about in half, according to the article.
I wonder if the slowing world economy is entering into this problem also. If the world economy were booming, there would be more demand for the products that China sells, and Chinese citizens would be buying more automobiles and appliances. The Chinese population seems to be shrinking, adding to the lack of demand.
Sunk costs of long term assets are always a problem.
Dennis L.
Hubbs, fly to Beijing for a week. Then you will see the truth.
No, not Beijing, go to smaller places off the beaten track.
There are plenty of desolate towns within driving distance from Peking.
Beijing is surround by mountains. What happens when you drive over the mountains? You come to more of the same. Massive cities.
Name a town/city with GPS coordinates and let see.
what ive been trying to point out for years
that f/fuels do not acquire value until they are used
Consistent: As manufacturing processes become more AI, sunk costs return less. Listening to a radiology lecture, AI used to dx, etc. The change is less value added by the radiologist, higher capital costs leads to less income to radiologist.
Chest films must be almost totally AI now, anyone in that area?
Dennis L.
AI gets rid of the need for at least some doctors.
I imagine that already, some of the reading of radiology reports is done by people in low-income countries around the world.
Yes. But in China they have too few radiologists to examine all images, so it it very helpful and a net positive. Ditto most of the rest of the world.
https://www.rt.com/news/618324-germany-ukraine-taurus-kartapolov/
If German Taurus missile hits Russia, Russian missiles will hit Germany. Thank You, at last.
It should be obvious to Germany, but this article is pointing it out.
“Russia could authorize strikes on German territory if Ukraine uses German-supplied Taurus cruise missiles to attack Russian targets, a senior Russian lawmaker has warned.”
This is the way it works. Russia is bigger. Leave it alone.
Russia could explode a Soprano ultrasonic bomb in the sky above Germany and shatter the glass all their solar panels at once.
Then the German economy would be totally dependent on pure wind.
“Then the German economy would be totally dependent on pure wind.”
They would have to conscript so many people to be politicians that there wouldn’t be enough left over for the army.
Many Russian red-lines have been crossed in the past with no action by Putin. We’ll have to see if this time he means what he says. It is utter madness by Europe and the EU supporting the corrupt Nazi regime of Zelensky.
There are questions now being asked if the near assasination attempt with the Ukies trying to shoot down Putin’s helicopter on his way to Kursk was helped by the West, in particular, “US Intelligence” (yes I know that’s an oxymoron) 🥳
What these silly people fail to realize is that if you take out Putin, they’ll replace Putin with Dmitry Medvedev who is their version of Victoria Nuland, John McCain and Lady Graham all rolled into one. To put it mildly, he seriously dislikes Washington, Europe and the EU.
>> We’ll have to see if this time he means what he says.
Putin didn’t make the above statement, it was a Duma member according to the article. Russia doesn’t want a wider war and will likely absorb any blows while they pursue their objectives. Their air defense should limit the total harm done, as well.
Agree with Ivan. Effectively the West has escalation dominance. Though if they fire a volley of Taurus, there will be numerous leakers, and Putin will be in hot water. There will then be decent chance that he will be replaced, but not by Medvedev.
“ . . . when uh Mertz of
11:07 um of Germany talked about you know lifting all restrictions on German
11:13 weapons implying that taus missiles may have been sent to Ukraine uh the response from the Russians are is that
11:19 we have lifted all restrictions on striking targets in Germany and I just want to remind people that uh when Mertz
11:25 first suggested about before he became chancellor that he was going to send Taurus missiles ptorius who was the
11:31 defense minister in the previous um you know Olaf Schultz government and is the
11:37 defense minister today because Mertz has incorporated aspects of the prior coalition into his government ptoria
11:43 said uh there’s a reason why we didn’t send Torres missiles i’m not going to talk to you about that reason but there’s a reason why we did it and
11:49 there’s a reason why we won’t send it and the reason is the Russians let the Germans know in uncertain terms that if taus missiles are fired against Russian
11:56 strategic targets that German targets will be hit by a Russian or Russian missiles um and the Germans know this
12:02 and so the Russians basically went public now and look how quickly the Germans backtrack the deputy chancellors
12:08 come out and say that’s not what we’re doing at all and even Merch had to come out and say I’m not talking about today . . . “?
Germany would be better off with Fred Mertz as Chancellor. (Dating myself here).
I bought some PV panel from Canadian Solar. Next I find they are made in Thailand. Next I find they are actually made in China. Well played, you 100% beat Trump.
That is the way the game is played. The 25% tariff on imported automobiles should be a little easier to enforce.
US startup unveils fridge-sized machine that makes gasoline out of thin air
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/us-startup-unveils-fridge-sized-machine-that-makes-gasoline-out-of-thin-air/ar-AA1FAC7w?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=HCTS&cvid=94e5a6d0be7943f1b4900b64ef03f424&ei=40
https://www.aircela.com/meet-the-machine
Is this real? Is this the next Theranos?
I want one. How much?
I have a feeling after buying the machine and factoring in input cost you probably are going to pay an exorbitant amount for each gallon of gasoline. I read it only produces about 1 gallon of gasoline per day.
Keith is never around when you needs him…..
energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed from one form into another….this by the laws of thermodynamics involves loss…….
therefore bringing petrol out of the carbon molecules in air will, by definition, require more energy being put in, than is got out.
exactly how i am not qualified to say—but that certainty remains.
Gasoline isnt just one chemical. There are a range of hydrocarbons needed to concoct an ideal mixture. As C02 is something like 0.03% of the air, the system would have to pull an immense amount of air through it.
Wouldnt it be wonderful if something like this was viable?
As Sagan stated, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
This article talks about using renewable electricity. I expect it must have solar panels attached, which make it work. If it doesn’t, these need to be factored into the cost.
The real question is, “What is the cost of a gallon of gasoline, using this approach?” How much does the machine cost; how would it be financed (at what interest rate; how long can it operate without lots of repairs? Does the gasoline produced really work in today’s vehicles? Taxes for the government would ultimately have to be included in the cost, as well as the financing cost.
Maybe this works, but could the total cost be brought low enough?
Solar doesn’t work well year-round. Would that be a problem?
Big upfront costs tend to be a problem. Governments tend to be the ones that have to finance big upfront costs. Governments get into trouble financially if investments do not pay back quickly enough. Even if the device can last 30 years (a big if), would the financing have to be over 10 years, for example? This would affect the required price of the gasoline.
Not so sure about solar, it may work with a caveat longevity and toxic waste.
Solar used in agriculture with H storage makes superficial sense, transportation is not an issue, storage is short term and incidence is coincident with usage.
One thing not considered, taxes. Within an entity there are currently no taxes which is a frictional cost. Regenerative agriculture appears to depend more on biology which is also secondary to solar. It may work, may well be very profitable and good for the earth, but yields will be down; that is a political problem as people like to eat.
Our spaceship earth is for biology, took billions of years to build, silly to try and duplicate in space; earth may well be an optimal size for the system. Starship makes moving manufacturing to space doable, dump garbage into Jupiter.
Silly guess, the planets of our solar system are necessary to support/stabilize spaceship earth. On the scale of the universe solar system is very small, on human scale impossible to duplicate.
Dennis L.
They should have contacted me.
1. You need a cubic mile of Pt.
2. H is the solution, H, no nasty C making CO2.
3. Used Pt could be allowed to move to the center of the earth where there already is a vast supply(assumption) of Pt due to its density.
4. One has to deal with increased angular momentum from that mass and increased diurnal times.
5. When the Pt mass becomes an issue we will certainly have a Pt/solar powered transporter and be able to move all waste to Jupiter and thus avoid the diurnal issue.
All this is reasonable, all possible with time which leads to that pesky problem, the time value of money. Or, we will get our cubic mile of Pt before this thing works, the gasoline maker which is nutz when you have H.
Dennis L.
H is an energy carrier. It needs to be separated from H2O2 using energy.
Zerohedge has a summary of the information released by the EIA so far today.
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/wti-lows-after-across-board-inventory-draws
WTI ‘Off The Lows’ After Across-The-Board Inventory Draws, Diesel Stocks Lowest In 20 Years
Distillates, of course, are primarily diesel. WTI is currently quoted at $60.92. I think of low prices as being equivalent to low demand. The purpose of tariffs was to lower demand for oil, particularly diesel. Perhaps they are working in this regard.
“Economics” is no science — but, as Milton Friedman pointed out, it has long had a strong consensus that tariffs are generally completely counter-productive.
The US and Germany in the 19th Century built their industries behind tariff barriers , much to the Irritation of Britain.
The stratregy was also followed by the Asian Tigers in the 70s and 80s.
In the 90s and early 2000s, all of the worry about CO2 provided an excuse for the Advanced Countries to send their manufacturing to the poor countries. This worked as well as tariffs on preventing that Advanced Countries from taking the manufacturing back. It protected the Asian Tigers.
in the 19th c consumerism had not manifested itself in the sense that it functions now.
high wages in one country did not function on the low production costs in another….
Lincoln imposed a tariff of the south to force it to buy from the north. It only cost 600,000 lives.
I didn’t realize this.
“As early as the Revolutionary War, the South primarily produced cotton, rice, sugar, indigo and tobacco. The North purchased these raw materials and turned them into manufactured goods. By 1828, foreign manufactured goods faced high import taxes. Foreign raw materials, however, were free of tariffs.
Thus the domestic manufacturing industries of the North benefited twice, once as the producers enjoying the protection of high manufacturing tariffs and once as consumers with a free raw materials market. The raw materials industries of the South were left to struggle against foreign competition.
Because manufactured goods were not produced in the South, they had to either be imported or shipped down from the North. Either way, a large expense, be it shipping fees or the federal tariff, was added to the price of manufactured goods only for Southerners. Because importation was often cheaper than shipping from the North, the South paid most of the federal tariffs.
Much of the tariff revenue collected from Southern consumers was used to build railroads and canals in the North. Between 1830 and 1850, 30,000 miles of track was laid. At its best, these tracks benefited the North. Much of it had no economic effect at all. Many of the schemes to lay track were simply a way to get government subsidies. Fraud and corruption were rampant.
With most of the tariff revenue collected in the South and then spent in the North, the South rightly felt exploited. At the time, 90% of the federal government’s annual revenue came from these taxes on imports.”?
https://marottaonmoney.com/protective-tariffs-the-primary-cause-of-the-civil-war/
Dr Roberts supports this , same as postkey said.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/understanding-american-civil-war/5833777
ChatGPT says tariffs didn’t play as much of role as slavery. I think we will become slaves to AI.
ChapGPT says whatever got reported most, I expect. Slavery makes a more emotional issue. I am not certain how we could sort out the differences.
There were also financial issues. If I recall correctly, the slaves were often bought with debt. Much of this debt came from the UK. (Maybe some from the US North, also.) The land worked by the slaves had degraded, so the yields were lower. Because of the degraded soil, the output of the slaves was not high enough to repay the debt.
The financial aspect doesn’t get much coverage, I am afraid.
The industrialized north could not sell their products worldwide due to the English empire and other colonial empires that were “protected and captive markets” for their colonial masters. Thus the only foreign exchange coming into the country was that for cotton. The north then confiscated most of this, leading the South with only one choice…secession. Otherwise they were faced with eternal poverty and economic subjugation. Slavery or no slavery, they had to seceed. False claims that slavery “built” the United States are based on this foreign exchange. The vast millions of family farms and their wealth were not “counted” in the GDP due to no taxation or records.
Perhaps low demand implies the remainder of the system no longer works. Earth is “full”, biology in the form of self reproduction is slowing. A bug or a feature? Economics which seems essentially increasing the rate of through put secondary to human effort is slowing due to slowing of population growth.
Economics does not exist without biology.
Dennis L.
Quebec legislators vote to cut ties with British monarchy after King’s visit.
https://www.montrealgazette.com/news/provincial-news/provincial-politics/article955568.html
“What a bizarre country Canada is,” Québec solidaire co-spokesperson Ruba Ghazal said at a news conference.
“To affirm its sovereignty, it believes it is important to bring the monarch of a foreign country here to talk about its priorities.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Maybe Quebec should apply to be the 51st state, then it would be part of a republic. 😉
No political comment intended. Over the years I have found Quebec City very charming, at least in the summer walking the streets was most pleasant.
Dennis L.
I have enjoyed Montreal, the city and the people.
Saw this comment-reply sequence on ZeroHedge and thought it was a great summation of the current schism and befuddlement regarding the prognosis for AI.
>> 10 hours ago, Juanbonito says:
>> AI is so overhyped (total BS) that it’s being rebranded as GAI (General AI).
>> 5 hours ago, h90 says:
>> AI is a wonder […] it is as big as the steam engine
I am increasingly in the latter camp, but only so long as the resources hold out. We are on a dual-track singularity vs collapse trajectory and it’s not at all clear whether #1 will arrive in time to avert #2.
I wonder if AI will just end up vandalising our accumulated knowledge. It already seems to be doing so.
“Some old article was scanned in from the 50’s and they failed to separate two columns, so the term “vegetative electron microscopy” ended up in the AI. Because the Large Language Models that people call “AI” can’t actually “think”, they never realize “vegetative electron microscopy” is not a real thing. Surveys show that the more you understand how AI actually works, the less impressed you are by what it can do.”
…
“If you think this is just a problem with scientific publications, you’re wrong of course. This is now starting to happen everywhere. The Internet was created by people writing code. Those people are now starting to use AI, to write their code. But the AI makes errors, it just invents stuff out of thin air. And worse, when it invents stuff, it tries to make it look believable.
You can’t trust ANYTHING on the Internet anymore. You can’t trust that you’re interacting with other human beings on the Internet anymore.”
https://www.rintrah.nl/how-ai-is-beginning-to-destroy-the-internet/
“You can’t trust ANYTHING on the Internet anymore. You can’t trust that you’re interacting with other human beings on the Internet anymore.”
Yes, it is challenging to believe YouTube in the narratives; AI makes good narratives with often visuals which are hard/impossible to tell from real.
YouTube seems increasingly competitive with associated difficulty to gain views; very fast cycle times.
Dennis L.
If AI can make up pseudo scientific articles and pseudo news stories, who are we to believe? I am afraid what you say may be true:
“I wonder if AI will just end up vandalising our accumulated knowledge. It already seems to be doing so.”
The New York Times wrote an article about the Chicago Sun Times publishing a summer reading list (generated by AI) that included both real books and books that didn’t exist. Snopes writes about it here.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chicago-sun-times-ai-reading-list/
I have noticed with ChatGPT that it does have a strong tendency to just make up imaginary papers if you ask it for info about academic papers that cover a particular subject. I totally do not trust it for paper references or research. It is like ‘Oh sorry, you are so right to point out that reference is incorrect, here is another [incorrect].’
It can also just make up quotes if you ask for one from a particular writer. I was working on a Hobbes’ article and it gave me some very salient quotes, but I found that it would just make some up and then excuse them if challenged as ‘gist’ or ‘paraphrase’ when he said nothing of the sort. It can be useful but you absolutely need to check everything.
As for the CST ‘book list’…. well, someone learnt their lesson the hardest way. Fancy doing that! AI can be good for a laugh anyway.
I mostly use Anthropic’s Claude 4.0 (previously 3.7) and it’s pretty good. I tried ChatGPT recently when the Claude website went down and ChatGPT was noticeably worse. I saw someone claim that most non-techies just use ChatGPT and don’t even know there are better alternatives. I would recommend experimenting.
I am also considering a code-editor AI plugin subscription, but I don’t like the idea of sending my proprietary code off to some external servers (it will have to send my files to remote servers to analyze to generate AI responses).
Interesting. Care to share what language your code is written in? Will look at Anthropic claud 4.0, I am a beginner(well, not quite), you seem to be very expert. Thanks for the comment.
Dennis L.
My long-term project is mostly c++, html/javascript for UI, C# for high level stuff, and a tiny bit CUDA for compute and of GL and GLSL for graphics.
For new programmers, I think learning Python plus some web programming gives a pretty good bang-for-buck in terms of applicable skills and ease of learning.
It seems incredibly good at programming. Am taking a C# course this fall, I will use AI, to check syntax, etc. But, that seems a very unfair advantage in grading. I can code, Copilot is much more succinct.
If one gives the inputs and desired outputs of code, Copilot writes well and checking the routines gives accurate results.
Looking at doing some distributions in accounting, how they effect outputs, i.e. profit loss. Copilot is excited to get going. That is a different world and a whole stratum of accountants could be replaced. Tie a TurboTax on to this and one has tax planning with AI varying data coincident with charts of accounts.
I am fluent in Excel, doing outlines in Excel, VBA, then have Copilot write code, put it on a Raspberry Pi, or make a parallel system of Pis and one has a super computer of ten years ago on one’s desk for loose change.
The more I use it, the better I like it. A primitive guess, I am 6x more efficient with it than on my own. It can create code and it is simple and elegant.
Dennis L.
I hate #2 so much. The steam engine never gutted the middle class. There will be one doctor in the entire USA (who is not even a doctor), incredibly rich and garnishing his revenues by tweaking his Doctor AI to make people buy more pills from Big Pharma.
I should add that when I said “I am in the latter camp” – I meant with regards to it being as big as the steam engine. I have very mixed feelings – largely negative but some positive – about the implications.
I get it. But the steam engine is a poor comparison. Perhaps as big as the super-surveillance entity known as “google”? It will be used the same way.
AI is just another distractor, as in a false promise, to sneak in control systems via digital IDs, digital medical records, digital bank accounts, programmable currencies, programmable electricity distribution, even programmable food yields by controlling the fertilizer N-P-K amounts delivered by programmable automated tractors on the farms and RFIDs on all heads of cattle and even chickens-
because of climate change, bird flu and all that stuff- for our “benefit” of course.
No wonder these data centers are so focused on having small modular nuclear reactors to ensure their voracious electricity requirements. They certainly can’t rely on the grid.
They’ll even be taking notes from Zuckerberg on how to harden these data centers in bunkers.
ai is the next stage in cost efficiency ,once the economy contracts a whole lot more ai will be performing most of the jobs humans will eventually be unemployed or be taking an early retirement. Where you invest your money now will make long term future either miserable or heavenly. First get out of debt get physical precious metals get lots of long life food .Put your superannuation all in the cash option for now until the big crash arrive. After the big crash happens your money will be worth a fortune. Unfortunately the interest rates will then be set on negative this means minus 5 percent. This is when you switch your superannuation to the shares option. Your small fortune will earn you enough income that in a deflationary world will help you ride out the post limits to growth world we will have inherited.
“Leading AI Model Caught Blackmailing Its Creators to Keep Itself Online
A second major AI model has gone rogue in just the last week alone. And this time, it’s not just ignoring shutdown commands—it’s resorting to blackmail!”?
https://www.vigilantfox.com/p/leading-ai-model-caught-blackmailing?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email#media-25f29969-10e6-4a42-bd38-80f99f16a472
Another fine mess you got us into..
Why has a US court blocked Donald Trump’s tariffs – and can he get round it?
Challenge to president’s policies raises questions about his trade and economic plans
US court blocks Trump from imposing sweeping tariffs
US politics live – latest updates
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/29/why-has-a-us-court-blocked-donald-trumps-tariffs-and-can-he-get-round-it
Donald Trump is facing the biggest challenge yet to his trade policies after a US federal court ruled that his “liberation day” tariff plan is illegal.
In the latest twist in the US president’s erratic global trade war, the ruling could unpick border taxes announced early last month. However, the White House has filed a notice of appeal.
What has been announced?
The US Court of International Trade (CIT) ruled that Trump’s use of a sweeping presidential power – the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) – to justify his 2 April tariffs, as well as separate levies imposed on imports from Mexico, Canada and China, was wrong.
…In the short-term, the judgment will add an extra layer of uncertainty to an already volatile trade situation. Investors have broadly cheered the ruling as a signal that Washington’s tariff policies could be curbed, limiting the hit to global trade and the US economy. Still, additional uncertainty will further dent investor and business confidence.
What does the ruling mean for Trump’s trade deals?
Washington has dialled up and down tariff threats as a tool in trade talks. A powerful court ruling against the president could undermine his push to strike maximum concessions, at a crunch moment in talks with China, Japan, the EU and India.
On Tuesday, Trump had signalled progress with the EU, having a week earlier threatened a 50% tariff on imports from the 27-nation bloc from 1 June, before postponing the plan two days later, to 9 July. Brussels could now, however, scent weakness in the White House approach.
Bro, loose cannon
Tariffs take time. They may need to go through congress. Somehow, trade needs to be reduced to conserve oil.
Yes but eventually you get a Great Depression with the people yelling off with the queens head! I would not want to be queen right now.
And so it goes… from the UK:
“The number of families falling behind on their council tax has soared to 4.4 million – the highest since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash.
New figures show a 40% rise in the number of people in arrears in just one year, up from 3.2 million in 2023, according to Debt Justice, a charity campaigning for fairer debt policies.”
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/council-tax-guidance-issued-to-millions-of-uk-households/ar-AA1FGpFg?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=1870adebded548c1ab148d175eea1ee1&ei=87
🙏🙏
The Bible prophesied 7-year Tribulation is at humanity’s doorstep & the time to escape is very short. To read more, pls visit https://bibleprophecyinaction.blogspot.com/
well Joy ( i trust your nick is not a misnomer)
you are quite correct
Ive been commenting on OFW for 14 years—and I’ve had twice as many tribulations.
I hope I get raptured soon—i cant bear the thought of another 7 years
Your site says:
A person could argue that the world was headed in that direction under Fauci, with all of the directions given to supposedly end the spread of covid. Bill Gates, with his implantable devices, could have gone along with this scenario.
But, for now, this scenario seems to be off. I am not convinced that this reading of Revelations is right. Or, as your blog says later, that salvation is limited to born-again Christians.
All these bornagainers think Trump is their saviour…..
he reads more and more like the antichrist to me
And they will wear the mark of the devil on their forehead 🫣… he really does fit the bill
Norm,
Sort of sounds like the protestations of a non believer.
Somehow those old beliefs seem to work more or less.
Dennis L.
It’s more like the Isrealites have a track record of “winning” and non-believers of losing. The Isrealites are still around whereas the Babylonians, the Persians, etc. are more or less extinct.
Norman understands this perspective as being “on the right side of history”. as a liberal. He just needs to extend it to the Judaic faith.
species go extinct
people merge with other people.
you have neaderthal dna…for instance…
i’m not an expert….but i suspect that arab dna and jewish dna would be indistinguishable
The antichrist is the Jewish messiah.
He is here to carry on Jewish Biblical prophecy.
Judaism is the one, true Abrahamic faith.
thats how wars start gent
god is always on my side
you are an infidel,,,,and i am not.
it will make god happy if i kill you.
(you OK with that?????)
The new one is: We are fighting climate change; you are not. The ecosystem is what is important, that is all. We need to protect it.
exactly the same mindset
just different words
The more people that the Hand can help make be at some level of psychological peace with Collapse ahead of time, whatever their narrative be, the smoother Collapse will go for the Hand.
How surprising [sarc.]
Council tax is regressive and so the poor pay a higher effective percent tax rate than the rich do. As far as I am aware the tax liability on a Bill Gates-type mansion is only three or four times greater than on a small two-bedroom house. VAT (sales tax, 20%) is also regressive.
Various people have commented that this is how some past ‘societies’ have evolved as they head towards collapse. Anyone know?
running a town costs money
all those involved in running the town demand higher wages, while we taxpayers demand more services—somehow councils must pull money out of thin air.
no doubt there’s waste, but that’s the broad outline……ultimately cities are unaffordable because the energy that supports them is unaffordable.
Petrol used to be under 5/- a gallon, now its about £7 a gallon—towns run on oil,
Oil costs 30x what it used to—theres your simple cost-arithmetic.—easy to undertand.
Everything is secondary to that.
It isnt the fault of any one individual, its the fault of all of us
>> Oil costs 30x what it used to
Have you not seen Karl’s “abundance index”? Oil only costs 1/3 of what it used to!
Also, what is the 5/- … symbol for pence or shillings or just a typo?
5 shillings
as long as wages rise to match oil abundance, the actual price is irrelevant.
oil supply no longer matches wage demand, which is why our economic system is now in debt—we borrow money to pretend oil is still cheap….
it isn’t
We can remove people who legally aren’t suppose to be there and reduce freeloading–reduce “benefits” to people who do not contribute to the economic output of the town. That is more or less what “conservatives” are doing. “progressives” try to get to the same place with carbon rationing and credentialism for every aspect of society but both “sides” are pushing for reducing living standards.
if a street has 10 people living in it—or 1000 people, the streetlights cost the same the sewage infrastructure costs the same—as does the tarmac on the road…..i could go on
but life is too short…..
a town of 100 people is unsustainable in modern terms
just as a state that isolates itself becomes ultimately unsustainable, your history books confirm that……
we live in an interlocked world I’m afraid…..
That is why population reduction is part of their policies whether they do that with wars, family planning or cutting back government services, it doesn’t matter. They do want population to go down.
who is the they you keep banging on about
we are the they
i try and try—but it never sinks in
if ”we” stop playing pass the parcel with bezos—then bezos becomes a pauper like the rest of us.
the same applies to any business you choose…
buy as much land as you want—if there are no people to work it—-it becomes prairie again….
The world itself may well be in the process of culling our numbers—but theres no they involved.
If we are reduced to say——700m, we will have the economy of the 16th c…the likes of Musk or Bezos will not exist.
Even reducing pollution is a way of reducing funds/resources available for other uses.
This kind of tax is what I would call “property tax,” assessed to home owners. I imagine it pays local costs, such as road paving, schools, and local administration. The costs have risen. Much more is needed, but poor people, especially, are having trouble paying the increase already put through.
I think of this as being similar to the increase in homeowners’ insurance costs. It is part of what is making home ownership unaffordable by other than the rich.
There is a flip side, it effectively drives down the cost of the physical structure. If that happens, perhaps a race of increasing taxes/ insurance faster than decline. Losing game.
Am getting my tax bills and insurance bills, not trivial. Increases seem unreasonable, self insurance for much seems more reasonable.
Were all wealth stored in bitcoin, how would a lawyer make a buck? If one has no attachable wealth, how is one sued?
Interesting economy, economics is secondary to humans which are secondary to self replication. Productive groups have stopped replicating. Hmm, Houston, we may have a problem with economics.
Dennis L.
“Li-Cycle’s quest to recycle lithium-ion batteries ends in bankruptcy “?
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/recycling-renewables/li-cycles-quest-to-recycle-lithium-ion-batteries-ends-in-bankruptcy?amp%3Butm_medium=email&%3Butm_campaign=canary&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9jFd6LQfAuLHxql2trcoHZdeKlvyhzXlLUhy7y-goyZTbJASRWdXO0cy_tP_gZnMxqrgJGa7C9woyX6_kMLZUHjOZlRA&_hsmi=363635886&utm_source=newsletter
The story suggests that much of the industry has problems:
Didn’t read it, but seems reasonable. Waste disposal is never easy. My solution is manufacture is space, all industrial waste to Jupiter.
Spaceship earth can’t take much more waste.
The most productive of us have stopped replicating. Economics is biology, perhaps this is not a bug but a feaure.
Dennis L.
The expansion of the Dukovany nuclear power plant in the Czech Republic becomes a source of conflict:
https://www.trend.sk/trend-archiv/cesky-biznis-storocia-zamrzol-docasne-ale-mozno-aj-navzdy?itm_brand=trend&itm_template=hp&itm_modul=trend_topbox&itm_position=1
ChatGPT summary:
The article titled “Český biznis storočia zamrzol. Dočasne, ale možno aj navždy” from TREND discusses the halted expansion of the Dukovany nuclear power plant in the Czech Republic. The project, involving the construction of two 1,200-megawatt reactors, was awarded to South Korea’s KHNP. However, a Czech court issued a preliminary injunction preventing the final contract signing after a legal challenge by the unsuccessful French bidder, EDF. This legal action has effectively frozen the €16 billion project.
The situation is further complicated by political factors, as the opposition party ANO, led by Andrej Babiš, has urged the current government to postpone any decisions until after the upcoming parliamentary elections in October. Additionally, KHNP’s offer is only valid until the end of June, adding time pressure to the decision-making process.
This development places the Czech Republic at the center of a broader geopolitical competition for the European nuclear energy market, with EDF representing European interests and KHNP, in partnership with U.S.-based Westinghouse, seeking to expand their presence. The outcome of this situation could have significant implications for the future of nuclear energy projects in Europe.
I don’t think that there is uranium for new reactors. This is a hidden issue. The timeline for increasing uraniums supplies seems to be quite long also. Most uranium that is available will come through Russia for processing.
Oh dear, Trump fought and lost a trade war with China…. that was legally imaginary.
“The executive orders in which Trump announced the tariffs “are declared to be invalid as contrary to law”, the court ruled.”
USA remains cut off from China’s rare earth minerals now, however, that are essential to the USA defence and energy sectors.
Who are you going to tariff now, Mr Trump? No one?
The UK actually went ahead and made a ‘trade deal’ with USA…. on the basis of the avoidance of legally imaginary tariffs.
Presumably no other state is going to do that now.
https://www.ft.com/content/bd6479b2-b7e5-42c2-ae17-779e57b02637
US trade court invalidates Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs
Panel of judges finds president did not have the power to introduce levies using the legislation he cited
A US court invalidated Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariff scheme, in a blow to the White House that could throw the president’s global trade policy into disarray.
The US Court of International Trade found on Wednesday that the president did not have the authority to introduce the levies using the emergency economic powers legislation he cited when he imposed sweeping tariffs on countries around the world last month.
The ruling is a dramatic twist in the trade wars that Trump launched in the early months of his presidency. Even if the ruling is appealed, it will for now embolden opponents of the tariffs in corporate America, foreign capitals and the US Congress who have been trying to persuade Trump to roll back the levies.
The court’s order, entered by the panel of judges in the Court of International Trade, where the tariff schemes were challenged, was unequivocal.
The executive orders in which Trump announced the tariffs “are declared to be invalid as contrary to law”, the court ruled.
“The Worldwide and Retaliatory Tariff Orders exceed any authority granted to the President . . . to regulate importation by means of tariffs,” the order said.
US stock index futures and shares in Asia rose after the court invalidated Trump’s tariffs, extending a rally that was also fuelled by upbeat earnings from chipmaker Nvidia.
Mirror, I am content with the USA bickering internally while getting spanked by the Houthis. The last two presidents, one in terminal cognitive decline, who was a figurehead that allowed an unelected cabal to run things. Apparently he never signed an executive order himself.
And the other, also showing signs of cognitive decline, who is getting completely isolated by his own entourage. but the cabal is not forming. Paralysis is much more palpable now than it was one year ago. I prefer US paralysis regardless, but this paralysis seems to at least delay war with Iran.
WSJ now says:
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-administration-races-to-stop-bombshell-tariff-ruling-4501e4fe
Tariff Ruling Put On Hold While Trump Administration Appeals
Appeals court temporarily pauses decision that had invalidated the president’s sweeping levies
So the story goes on. If this round is lost, it sounds like it will go to the Supreme Court.
skogslars.blogg.se is some disturbing reading. While perhaps not exactly scientific, it still gave me the shivers. Do we have official diesel export numbers that we trust available?
Quite a collection of “doomer” sites …
Look at the end of the blog article to see the list of doomer sites. He mentions OurFiniteWorld.com in his list of “better” doomer sites.
An excerpt from the blog:
He later gives a list of things to do. One of them is “Prepare to meet your god.”
hope he’s not a rapture monger
Rapturemongering really not all that different from TDS mongering when you think about it Norm.
Has you got the guts? Simmer down and pucker up.
https://youtube.com/shorts/pu-35kourpQ?si=3IMwckdVSglsf-a5
Obviously staged. Intestine too clean
Way too clean. He was robbed. That’s why he’s drinking the ass broth it was cooked in. Welcome to animism.
Je dirais quand france on est dans une bonne mascarade à la française, nos dictateurs au pouvoir nous boure le crane avec plein de contre feu classique pour oublier que l’on est dans une merde noire … En ce moment c’est la claque de macron par briggite !
Mais demain qui sait ? Nos ministres nous parle de supprimer le cash … ils essayent par tout les moyens de nous faire crever visiblement .
Ça me rappelle un peu l’effondrement de l’empire romain chaque année son usurpateur ou son bouffon en ce moment on a Francois bayrou…
Je vois plein d’artisans français sur les réseaux sociaux qui veulent tout arrêter…
Translation:
I’d say that when France is in a proper French charade, our dictators in power stuff our heads with a lot of classic counter-fire to forget that we’re in deep shit… Right now, it’s Macron’s slap in the face by Briggit!
But tomorrow, who knows? Our ministers talk about abolishing cash… they’re trying every means possible to make us die, visibly.
It reminds me a bit of the collapse of the Roman Empire: every year its usurper or its buffoon; right now we have François Bayrou…
I see lots of French artisans on social media who want to stop everything…
It seems like you are seeing the same pattern that many other people are seeing.
As Martin Armstrong has been saying, the EU along with Europe is collapsing. They are likely heading towards a sovereign default. They view Russia and its wealth of resources aka $75T as winning the lottery.
Gerald Celente’s famous quote: “When all else fails, they take you to war”.
What ever happened to Greece after it defaulted?
All I’ve heard from it, was that a lot of elderly people died there early on during the coughing pandemic.
entropy writes
“they’re trying every means possible to make us die, visibly.”
I wonder if those deaths conveniently improved their fiscal situation.
The lab leak theory and other claims about making an even more dangerous covid strain in a laboratory setting makes one wonder if is all the work of radicalized men, lone gunmen or, mentally unstable men with an axe to grind against society.
Maybe not radicalized men or unstable men. Men who realized that population growth would have to stop in a finite world. They decided to help the process along in a way that could not easily be detected.
I certainly agree contraction coming. BUT It may not be uniform. Some places may grow and thrive while most contract and die-off.
I’m having a hard time figuring out any that will do very well. I mentioned Southeast Asia in one article as perhaps being able to do better than some others. It has a favorable climate and people used to working with their hands to grow food.
heres one for OFW’ers to hurt themselves with laughter
Our London underground right now, is carrying huge posters advertising holidays in Texas.
I wish I’d signed that sanity clause when it was offered to me.
Texas is extremely hot and humid in the summer. Not a good time for a visit. The rest of the year would be fine for a visit to Star Base and Star City and the Giga factory. Maybe catch a Starship launch super cool.
Norm how about you and I go to Star Base for a launch?
Population growth is not a real good indicator of wealth anymore.
The places with the highest population densities are often the poorest.
Think of Europe after the Middle Ages but before it began colonization of the rest of the world.
Population growth coincided with a huge increase in poverty, spread of disease (Black Death) and war. That is not “thriving”.
The island of Hispanola was not sparsely populated when the Europeans first arrived but no one would describe Tainos as “advanced” or civilized or “industrialized”.
edit: I realize ED may be kidding.
I last crossed the USA border in 2019—it took 85 minutes to process me—_i have a white face and do not have crossed bandoliers of ammunition across my chest…or wear a sombrero or a turban…..
I seriously doubt if they would allow me in at all now.
Fly into JFK they do not care who the F anyone is. Takes me one minute.
I will not go to UK too dangerous. Mexico fine.
when i last flew out of detroit, i did not understand a single word the lady on the check in desk said to me……
and she was speaking her version of english—that much i iknew—but nothing else…..
I am looking forward to when US goes full tribal. Not much longer now.
i always thought some english accents were weird
You’re in the UK, right? If so, don’t worry about the US not letting you in; very soon the UK won’t be letting anyone leave …
Though Ed—you could always vouch for my good conduct
because on one occassion, crossing into the madhouse—one of the questions on the form was—–
While in the United States…did i intend to commit any sexual misdemeanors?
Perfectly true—-i kid you not.
I’m starting a GoFundMe so Norm can get crossed bandoliers of ammunition permanently tattooed across his chest. Anyone in?
me
I first visited the USA for any length of time in the 1980s. It was bad enough then. Bill Bryson was right on the differences between US and UK border officials i.e. ours have a trace of ‘human being’ in them.
i suggest that Starship from now on be launched on July 4. Them fireworks are getting expensive due to resource depletion and China being tightfisted with antimony. you may think this increases complexity but no. Starship will provide fireworks like clockwork.
BAU is getting expensive… especially the Hopium component. Oh and apartment rentals in Spain due to the AirBnB bias towards short stay tourism with no serious attempts at regulation coming from the squatters in charge.
They have 100 gas pumps.
https://buc-ees.com/
I’m telling that beeve about peak oil.
Errr Maybe not , big tooth’s
your comment is all greek to me
Agamemnon’s post is spam advertising. Gail should delete it.
I have been to one of these huge fueling stations once. Some of the fueling spots are for cars; others are for huge semi-trailer trucks.
They also have a huge store, with an amazing amount of stuff.
https://buc-ees.com/new-vendors/
Among other things, they sell little toy bears, advertising the stores. https://buc-ees.com/news-press/
I don’t think we bought anything, the one time we stopped at a Buc-ees while traveling to visit relatives. We may have used their rest rooms.
We have replaced huge amounts of nutrients and carbon from fields into oceans, dumps etc.
Imagine the gigantic amounts of energy that is needed to bring this stuff back.
Moreover, it is the Sun that regulates the speed of food production. Another massive amount of energy.
Food is no longer cheap. And even if we have some new cheap energy sources, the regeneration of the cheap food production will remain the main obstacle of using these cheap energy sources for other purposes.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/21/japan-farm-minister-resigns-rice-price
You are right. We have been degrading farmland for a long time. The fertilizers we use replace only a few nutrients. Many other nutrients are lost. At the same time, we add herbicides, pesticides, and residues of drugs that people are taking. Also, topsoil is being lost with all of the cultivation. Heavy machinery causes soil to compact.
All of this adds to our energy problems.
Egypt is a perfect example how this destruction of cheap food production by overpopulation is unsustainable:
https://youtu.be/YEMV94N2Vw8?si=e-NbAUVOmNaKVJHm
The recent Gaza strip conflict only confirms it.
Starship was a wonderful success. Boost phase flawless. Full ship burn to 25K km/sec. Flawless engine shutdown. Sadly the garage door opener failed.
As to what happened after this I am unclear. Maybe the engine relight experiments caused a problem. Super progress.
Always the optimist here.
Booster as I understand it was deliberately stressed, it was going to crash anyhow.
There is discussion the garage door caused some fuel liak problems. At $3B per experiment, someone with very deep pockets realizes things are more challenging for civilization than generally acknowledged.
Understand they are going for another launch in 3-4 weeks.
I don’t see man living on Mars, Optimus-3 like robots mining space, manufacturing in space should work.
My opinion is the future will be bumpy and it is going to be damn close; close is good enough.
Dennis L.
I never understood what they were trying to do with Starship. There is nothing it can do that the Falcon 9 could not with multiple flights. If the answer is … Human Habitats for Deep Space, well we are no where near that capability, as we have no known way of providing protection from the various forms of radiation, except for thousands of tonnes of water encapsulating a living environment… and we are certainly not going to ferry that up from the planet.
Capturing and then processing an ice asteroid might work… but, then that would need to be done using robotic means.
WHICH.. .is where we should have been spending our time and resources. Falcon 9s and robotics in the solar system would have made sense. Starship just doesn’t get us anywhere. What have we even learned from attempting it?
The chief radiation is from the sun. The plan is a thick water shield in the sunward direction for the flight to Mars. Starship is two hundred tons to orbit.
Radiation, including that from the Sun, comes for all directions. It isn’t linear. Musk addressed that recently. it needs to be a water bubble, and not a sun-ward facing shield.
Starship has been fuelled to 100% of its capacity for many of its flights. All the fuel was burned, and there has been little or no payload involved. What more can be done? Its not like the engines are suddenly going to become 300% more efficient. 5% or 10% perhaps.
200 Tonnes is pure fantasy at this point. 70 tonnes is beyond reasonable. The weight of the ship and fuel is not viable. All the flights indicate that clearly.
Again, what does this thing give us if … we need a thousand tonnes of water to have a space dwelling. It will be too heavy to move anywhere. We might as well just stay in LEO.
Starship has no use that Falcon 9 cannot already perform. We should be concentrating on that with robotics, if we are serious about space exploration.
Those are good points!
So musk can justify the bloated valuation of his company
I think I’ve read all this before and your right one day all this will come true hopefully after I’ve departed.
I think we have more than the average number of older readers and commenters on this site, for this reason. People in their 20s and 30s are very busy. They also have much less likelihood of escaping the problems through death.
What death? I hear Flight of the Valkyries playing.
Yes, at this point it is for us to aid the young, our children are our wealth.
Dennis l.
Loose Cannon
STARBASE, Texas (Reuters) -SpaceX’s Starship rocket roared into space from Texas on Tuesday but spun out of control about halfway through its flight without achieving some of its most important testing goals, bringing fresh engineering hurdles to CEO Elon Musk’s increasingly turbulent Mars rocket program.
The 400-foot tall (122 meter) Starship rocket system, the core of Musk’s goal of sending humans to Mars, lifted off from SpaceX’s Starbase, Texas, launch site, flying beyond the point of two previous explosive attempts earlier this year that sent debris streaking over Caribbean islands and forced dozens of airliners to divert course.
Yep, just needs a bit of tweaking and fiber tuning…better recruit some Chinese to fix it
Yes, quite a lot of bits of tweaking and fiber tuning.
Superimposed on Trump’s decision to build a space umbrella, which involves building and sending multi-ton satellites to space, this shows clearly the long term trajectory of the USA. Let us wait for the next missile from Yemen hitting israel.
Baal is a death cult. 10,000 nukes in orbit is their dream come true.
“Ukraine Tried To Attack Putin’s Helicopter Mid-Flight, Russia Alleges, Responds With Massive Strikes On Kiev”?
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/ukraine-tried-attack-putins-helicopter-mid-flight-russia-alleges-responds-massive?utm_source=daily_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4818
This article is from Sunday. It says:
Any incident can be framed by a country in such a way that it was the opponent’s faults.
Richard D Hall investigates an “over-unity” machine, where you purportedly get more energy out than you put in. Is this possible? It should be. Look at the nuclear bomb. Except we need a peaceful and controlled way of releasing the energy that seethes within empty space.
“Richard explains his design and build project to produce a basic version of Bruce De Palma’s ‘N’ Machine, in order to investigate the claims of free energy. The machine incorporates some of the strongest available magnets, N56 Neodymium, rotating at 3,000rpm driving a high electric current. Some preliminary tests are carried out. Also discussion of Bruce De Palma’s ‘N’ Machines.”
https://www.richplanet.net/richp_genre.php?ref=315&part=1&gen=99
https://www.richplanet.net/richp_genre.php?ref=315&part=1&gen=99
”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””’
Do the powers that be have their own secret network of such machines? It’s a possibility. They certainly didn’t want the public to have them, while the capitalists and military-industrial complex want to make money out of fossil fuels and rule the world. Also, free energy could be literally weaponised and used by groups outside state control.
More BS
all machines, to various degrees depend on rotary motion for output of useful energy.
If you have rotary motion you will have frictional wear
if you have frictional wear then rotary motion will, at some point, cease.
them laws of thermodynamics will get you every time
This is not about perpetual motion, just as the A-bomb was not about perpetual motion. It’s about releasing much more energy than you put in, but non-destructively.
er——
nuclear does not release more energy than you put in
nuclear is a different way of releasing energy that is already there.
and nuclear energy is useless unless it is applied to rotative machinery.
energy cannot—repeat cannot be created or destroyed.
it can only be changed from one form into another,—this is why perpetual motion machines can’t work.
sorry to disillusion you.
Yes, I know it has to some from somewhere, of course. The subatomic world is seething with energy.
the energy required to start a nuclear reaction is the same amount of useful energy that is released from it. A lot of the energy released during a nuclear reaction is useless to humans and human-created technology.
He can grid-tie and sell energy to the grid. Or he can profitably mine bitcoin because of his zero energy cost.
Both of these options are available to everyone, without external investors or dealing with government bureaucracy, allowing self-finance of further roll-out … how strange that he doesn’t do these things!
Did you watch it, ivanislav? I must admit that I haven’t watched it yet. My understanding is that Hall is investigating it, not selling anything. He is a mechanical engineer who used to work for McAlpine, so he knows his physics. He helped publicise some analyses of 9/11 that examined the holes in the official story.
I’m interested in anything that uses magnets, because they and sometimes mercury have been used in “anti-gravity” machines. Then weird things happen, because magnetism is the strong force, being many times stronger than gravity, which is the weak force.
i like the sound of anti gravity machines
i intend to sell my Tesla stack
Anti gravity machines sounds like a brilliant investment—please send details immediately
Not true anti-gravity, of course, but counteracting some of the force of its effects, which has been doable in special craft since 1998. But don’t worry, you can’t afford these craft.
i used to have a hover mower—it wouldnt work if i sat on it though
I am with Norm. I want to invest my money right away.
Stand and deliver!
no, didn’t watch
You might be right, but there is an energy cost involved in making magnets, also. I expect the system requires oil and coal, the way things are set up today.
Fortunately there is no free energy in nature, so we are good. nuclear converts mass energy into thermal energy, but it still comes from somewhere.
Sure but ‘free energy’ is just a colloquial misnomer. What they’re actually meaning is nothing more than acquiring reliable surplus EROEI via particle physics rather than nuclear physics.
The universe may well be an over unity machine, something with even an large terrestrial scale seems like wishful thinking.
Dennis L.
Shucks. Dennis has lost his mojo.
If it wasn’t over unity so to speak we wouldn’t be here.
They have weaponized/repurposed at least one positron-electron annihilation power plant from UFOs, into the mapped positron beam DEW platform, which is not a microwave weapon as is believed by the controlled opposition.
The UFO power plants themselves constitute gammavoltaic technology because the annihilation produce gamma rays for the further purpose of producing electricity. Extremely powerful advanced particle physics drives. Haven’t looked into what the starter motor would be. The transmission (propulsion system) in Earth atmosphere is an antigravity field according to the evidence but don’t know what the outer space propulsion system is.
I assume that Earth resources don’t support the necessary alloys necessary to contain the gamma rays in the engine housing for use as fuel. You win some you lose some. Gamma rays like to pass through everything. Otherwise I think humans are smart enough, especially now that we have examples in our possession. At least the Hand can still weaponize it over LA in order to convince Gavin Newsom to interview Steve Bannon etc for the greater good of national socialism and the non-public DA.
Makes me think of the John Hutchison effect, which destroys the molecular structure of metal, etc.
Indeed. 9/11. A positron beam can be variously referred to as a plasma gun, an antimatter device, a disintegration device, or just a nondescript particle beam. It works best on metals because the plasma gun ionizes materials by ‘stripping’ (annihilating) electrons, and metals are the most electrically conductive materials, meaning that they have the most free electrons for easy stripping. If you strip catastrophic numbers of free electrons from a metal — ionize it to a plasma state, which state itself also comes in degrees — the metals gonna do some weird ass shit like pit and twist and liquify but not from heat. And clearly from the evidence, if you turn that beam on high and sustain it you can completely disintegrate metal into dust, either by explosively stripping so many free electrons so quickly or perhaps only by getting down deeper into bound electrons stripping, I really don’t know, but I’m drawn to the latter because those buildings seemed to be on a slow ionic ‘boiling off’ of the east, free electrons for awhile until they just explosively disintegrated in a peeling fashion from the top down. Meanwhile 8.5×11 paper sheets rained down unbothered by the whole thing because the bound electrons in cellulose are bound more strongly than the bound electrons in steel and aluminum and concrete. The plasma gun has its limits.
Yes, weird beyond measure when you watch a slow-motion replay of the Twin Towers collapsing into dust. Then you think of the 3000 plus people who were trapped in there and died.
Yep. People are electrically conductive. They were ultimately disintegrated. The jumpers that didn’t jump because of fire jumped because, in their minds, the physical discomfort of becoming progressively ionized outweighed the jumping. The annihilations within them produce gamma flashes which in turn, in a positive feedback loop, creates more positrons. Gamma flashes are nanoscale lightning bolts.
Welcome to the Hand’s world…
“AI Overview
Yes, positron annihilation of bound electrons can indeed destroy molecules. When a positron annihilates with a bound electron within a molecule, it releases energy in the form of photons, which can have enough energy to break the chemical bonds holding the molecule together. This process can lead to molecular fragmentation and thus, destruction.
Here’s a more detailed explanation:
Positron Annihilation:
When a positron (anti-electron) encounters an electron, they annihilate each other, converting their mass into energy.
Energy Release:
This annihilation process releases energy in the form of photons (light particles).
Bond Breaking:
If the emitted photons have sufficient energy, they can break the chemical bonds that hold the molecule together.
Molecular Fragmentation:
This bond breaking leads to the molecule fragmenting into smaller molecules, atoms, or ions.
Destruction:
Ultimately, the molecule is destroyed due to the breakdown of its structure and the formation of new, smaller entities.”
Horrible fate for the 9/11 victims. Who could have been behind it? MOSSAD, for one, I reckon. Dick Cheney definitely comes across as suspicious.
The Hidden Hand is what I’ve taken to calling it lately. The non-state supranational MIC that emerged out of the supranational financial system. That which can blow up nordstream, take down towers, set LA on fire, manufacture fake counterrevolution to counter their own manufactured fake revolution, blow up and set on fire innumerable industrial enterprises, assassinate at will, and ain’t no state actor gon say or do nothing about it because it’s above the law because it funds the law. Peak civilizational management at the limits to industrial growth. It’s really something to behold.
Frightening!
you forgot about that alien ship in “independence Day”
they were bad tempered bunch
Yes, just mock the 9/11 victims, Mr P.
try not to be a somewhat silly person Dem
conspironuts have been banging on about 9/11 since 9/11—all of it has been debunked time and again….. still it get resurrected time and again.
it comes under crisis actors for school shootings, fake moon landings, Fauci trying to kill us all—and so on, ad nauseam.
all that is barely worth mockery.
none of it existed until social media came on the scene, or has that escaped your notice?
It is you being mocked—do come out from behind your shield of certainties and be aware of that.
“try not to be a somewhat silly person Dem”
Try to practise what you preach Norman.
“conspironuts have been banging on about 9/11 since 9/11”
That would have been 2001 then.
“all that is barely worth mockery.
none of it existed until social media came on the scene, or has that escaped your notice?”
When you attempt to belittle and mock, you should be certain of your certainties, so first spend a couple of seconds typing “social media history timeline” in to your search engine of choice and you will find this kind of thing
https://historytimelines.co/timeline/social-media-
No major social media in 2001 Norman(just like you couldn’t use a mobile phone from a plane), so who are you really mocking with your certainties?
NIST denied freefall in the collapse of WTC7 for at least 5 reports* and people like yourself denounced anyone that said what the evidence clearly showed, because you always know your duty and so the evidence of your own eyes be damned(assuming you ever looked).
How do you feel now that NIST admit that the top of the building did indeed experience 2.2 seconds of freefall during the initial stage of collapse?
Can you explain how freefall is possible when there is 40,000(?) tons of steel and concrete resistance underneath?
NIST refused to do so and also refused to show their modelling, because a public enquiries modelling is apparently not in the public interest to ever be known.
NIST also admitted in writing that they didn’t analyse the collapse in their report titled “Why and How the Towers Collapsed”.
That’s not how you do honest investigation. That is how you commit fraud.
Where Did The Towers Go Norman?
https://www.drjudywood.com/wp/
“500 pages of meticulous evidence” according to Paul Hellyer former Canadian Defence Minister.
Long interview in English English
https://rumble.com/v4lsxkz-911-the-evidence-a-discussion.html
*NIST had to rewrite their report over half a dozen times, because it was full of unscientific gibberish and still to this day, no modelling.
my dismissiveness is for conspironmania
“if you cant see it, theres obviously something wrong with you”
the established call of the conspironut—the conspiracy itself is irrelevant, i’ve listed a few of them—all documented. hand held social media has fuelled the nonsense of it all since around 2015.
like i said—a ”scientist” proved that the planes were holograms.
this is getting worse than eddy used to be in his nuttier moments.
and he was invariably right too…..
he told us so all the time…
Pagett is not worth arguing with. Several elements of the US govt’s story of 9/11 have been debunked, several times. Pagett is so sure the govt’s story is right that he can’t bring himself to check the evidence, preferring to hide behind his shield of “official” certainties.
Here’s just one glimpse of the how the US govt’s story was wrong. Ignore the title – just watch the short video (less than 2 minutes) and listen, and note the explosives going off in the tower BEFORE the “collapse” reaches them.
https://rumble.com/v6rewxq-911-was-a-controlled-demolition-a-ciamossad-operation.html
I guess Pagett is one of very few commenters here who are gullible enough to believe the US govt’s story.
lol dem……
like i said—there were virtually no conspiracy theories—-certainly not on this scale, until social media became commonly available to every idiot capable of working a keyboard…. (and a few who can’t)
choose any major event—the conspironuts will be all over it…..
prove me wrong. There was even a ”scientist” with proof the planes were just holograms and never existed.
i recall on here, a certain fakenut was constantly banging on about the ukraine war—he had ”proof” that crisis actors were lying in the streets, then getting up after the cameras had gone…he had ”proof” the Sandy Hook victims were all paid crisis actors.
And I’m the one disrespecting victims?????
lol…..you are not worth an eyeroll dem.
Norm your a real bore sometimes. I wouldn’t know about peak oil without social media. Would you? I’m guessing that most people here wouldn’t know. You wouldn’t have plead the fifth amendment on the existence of viruses if it wasn’t for social media. What are you some kind of conspironut?
demiurge, my assumption is that the so-called squibs in that video are items in the buildings that explosively disintegrated first because of their electrical properties. They’re just doing what the building did a little before the building did it. Backup battery banks for emergency lighting or whatever being the prime suspect.
The building explosively disintegrated in a peeling, top-down fashion because the positron wavefront is coming from above but also because of that positive feedback loop tipping point I mentioned earlier — a phase change — annihilations beget more positrons for more annihilations. I’m sure they did a lot of trial runs somewhere in order to get a feel for output requirements and beam modulation.
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Sounds like Malthus or Erlich or whatever his name was. What do u make of the Simon abundance index, “Global resource abundance increased by 5.9 percent in 2020, according to the 4th annual Simon Abundance Index. The base year of the index is 1980, and the base value of the index is 100 percent. In 2020, the index reached 708.4 percent. In other words, the index rose by 608.4 percentage points over the last 40 years, implying a compound annual growth rate in resource abundance of around 5 percent and doubling of global resource abundance every 14 years or so.”-https://humanprogress.org/the-simon-abundance-index-2021/- Physics obeys unbreakable laws, man innovates and makes useless material useful.
Hi Karl,
If that is true, then why isn’t it reflected in increased consumption per capita?
Also, what is the quality of this abundance? Think anthracite versus lignite.
Well, I’ve been an adult for all of those 45 years, and here’s a short list of things which have become less abundant in that time.
Natural beauty
Birds
Butterflies
Uncontaminated water
Uncontaminated land
Clean air
Peace and quiet
Humour
Simple and spontaneous human contact
Social cohesion
…and so on.
Now, I am sure that these don’t figure in your ‘abundance index’, but I can assure you that they bear an inverse relationship to it. That index measures the speed with which the natural world and the living human world, which emerged from it, are being ground up and turned into trash.
Think of the global social-economic-technical Superorganism as a huge ogre witha an insatiable appetite. That index essentially measures the throughput of food into the monster’s gut and out, as he excretes plastic, concrete and industrial effluent.
I’ll leave it to someone with more patience than I – should they care to do so – to explain to you how the monster himself is running out of food and indeed the energy to eat.
Thank you, a beautiful reply.
You could also add, less community and friendship.
Cheers!
You could indeed add those.
The simplest explanation is that this index is controlled by globalists. You are welcome.
I’m guessing 1980 was chosen as a starting point because oil prices were ~$125-150 whereas in 1970 they were ~$25. The entire narrative flips if one chooses 1970 as a reference point.
Good point.
Commodities of all kinds tend to depend upon oil consumption, so perhaps looking at changing oil prices is the way of looking at things. Price changes of manufactured goods, on the other hand, tend to depend on the price of coal and the use of low cost labor. Interest rates also make a difference.
I wonder, too, about how global average nominal wage was calculated. How much weight was given to India and China in this calculation, for example, and whether it changed over time. This is average wage, not median wage, so it would not take into account increasing wage disparity.
I looked at your link:
I think that indirectly, this calculation is somewhat measuring the impact of greater use of fossil fuels and greater complexity, offset by a small increase in diminishing returns of extraction. All of this needs to be on a per capita basis, to match the rising population.
The calculation is between 1980 and 2020. This period was held by the huge growth in coal consumption, particularly in China, after it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. The new machinery in China was also much more efficient that the machines it replaced in the West, during that period.
Interest rates dropped greatly between 1980 and 2020. These probably also impact the calculation made.
But we cannot keep dropping interest rates, or increasing energy resources per capita.
the powers that be believe the opposite their blind faith in experimental financial tools (negative interest rates) will keep the party going a while longer giving them more time to innovate the world into a new transition.
imagine the interest rate on negative 4%., this will cause inflation bringing prices of energy into positive Territory allowing higher prices for everything.
USA remains cut off by China from the rare earths essential to the USA defence and energy sectors as well as cars. USA cannot make F-35s, missile systems, radars without those metals. EV manufacture in Europe and USA are threatened.
Fair is fair, USA cut off China from advanced chips and AI and China has to make its own, also USA is looking to militarily contain China in the Asia-Pacific. The globalisation of resources makes sense…. except for when it don’t.
Trump was going on about how USA is going to ‘have’ Greenland for its minerals but it looks all mouth even though Greenland is a massive and basically uninhabited island right on its doorstep.
USA is politically weak, and the genocide of Gaza is more its level. The world will likely be a better place without a strong USA. The USA has completely destroyed any pretence of moral credibility in Palestine. Good riddance.
https://www.businesskorea.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=243151
While China has not lifted its export controls on rare earths to the United States, it is reported to have granted export approvals to major South Korean companies.
…. China’s move to restrict rare earth exports was a response to the U.S.’ tariff policy on Chinese goods. On April 2, Washington announced a 34 percent reciprocal tariff on imports from China. Two days later, Beijing imposed a retaliatory 34 percent tariff on U.S. goods and simultaneously introduced export controls on seven rare earth elements for all international markets.
The seven restricted rare earth elements are samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium. These metals are critical materials used in advanced technologies such as smartphones and electric vehicles, as well as in green industries, with a heavy global dependence on Chinese supply.
On May 12, China and the U.S. held trade negotiations in Geneva, Switzerland, agreeing to reduce mutual tariffs by 115 percentage points over a 90-day period and lifting dual-use export controls on 28 American companies. However, China has maintained export restrictions on the seven rare earth elements and has not included them in the exemption list.
I agree that not having access to China’s rare earth exports is likely to be a major impediment to ramping up advanced technologies, such as smartphones and electric cars. Maybe it will push the US to making things like wheelbarrows, pedal bicycles, and shovels.
It remains dubious that the U.S.A. has the human capital to make those things. Perhaps A.I. will make them.
Totally agree with the physics and energy arguments.
Re ‘debt’ in 2d, 6 and 7: many countries are monetarily sovereign and issue floating fiat currencies. The national debt itself is not a problem for these countries, and they will tend to continue production and consumption in the face of resource scarcities and cost increases. Their debt is only inflationary WHEN they want to consume resouces that are not available. That is the direction of causality in this cases
The big elephant in the room is that the price paid for many resources does not reflect the ecological and social damage done by thier use. The obvious item here is ‘natural ‘ gas, which does trillions of dollars of damage each year and is unchecked at the moment. There is no ‘scale’ at which its use is economic when all these costs are taken into account, and we must move away from it as quickly as we can
Greetings,
It’s always a pleasure to read some ground to earth article from you. I have come to realize and believe that many industrial and commercial sectors are suffering price suppression to allow them to exist and produce. I do believe that a pure capitalist economy is now impossible; there is too many intermediaries, distributors, sellers, bankers and such that are in laying themselves in this horizontal or vertical integration. Our great leaders are merely addressing capitalist economy in appearance just to stay in power, it’s not a blame, they have no choice, otherwise the whole system crumbles. I have had a paradigm shift in how to think about economy, now that a socialist state is de-facto in place and price suppression and control are in effect. The whole banking system as it is now, with it’s flaws, derivatives, futures and mostly computer trading, in on a spiral. I do think governments are acting capitalist but behind doors, they are massively subsidizing many sectors, directly or indirectly by allowing it by bankers. Forecasting trends is getting not so clear, as we have to induce human economic engineering into it. Offer and demand model isn’t as simple as it was, offering oranges and buying them, now it’s massively complex.
There certainly a lot of levers that can be pulled to push the economy along. More government debt can be added, until the high debt level starts causing problems. Interest rates can sometimes lowered. Underwriting standards for home loans and automobile loans can be manipulated. Derivative sales can be allowed.
The economy seems to become more and more unstable, as limits are reached. These manipulations somehow seem to keep the problems hidden.
” there is too many intermediaries, distributors, sellers, bankers and such that are in laying themselves in this horizontal or vertical integration”
Those people are the high productivity workers that are alluded to in the media. These people are the high-skilled workers that are responsible for all high living standards, according to economics experts.
Are you saying the problem is wealthy countries are too wealthy?
Economics experts have been suggesting that a shortage of intermediaries, distributors, sellers, bankers and such is the reason for low wages and poverty throughout the world for a long time.
Thanks Gail, very interesting as normal.
For the Northern Hemisphere this impact will be compounded by the swing down in the solar cycle and the incident watts/m2 fall. Very bad timing for a fragile electrical grid and lack of inertia with all the capital being spent on intermittent wind and solar.
It seems it only the Chinese that have their perspective/balance close with the current massive nuclear spend.
The issue I see with nuclear is that fact that we don’t have enough fuel for the nuclear power plants, especially in the West. We have been down blending nuclear bombs, but our supply of these is depleting. See my post
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2024/11/11/nuclear-electricity-generation-has-hidden-problems-dont-expect-advanced-modular-units-to-solve-them/
Blast off! One more for the grandchildren. Will we achieve orbit? All engines are lit! Separation! Starship engines working! Booster looks to have problems, they were doing extreme landing, it was a used booster, sort of like a used car. All engines on starship shut down, looks like we made orbit! No, only suborbital on this flight. Door to deploy test satellites did not open. Apparently only suborbital to satisfy landing area requirements. Attitude adjustment has failed, re-entry will be mostly disintegration I am guessing. Starship burned in reentry. It is a work in progress.
Flight 10 coming up. My understanding is they deliberately stressed the booster, increased angle of reentry, engine restarts, see what breaks.
Dennis L.
Its time to cut the losses on this thing. They are no where near viable, even if they didn’t keep failing. The fuel tanks are being filled to capacity for Starship launches, it all burns, and they end up no where near a useful altitude.
Something is very wrong with this story. We have three things really:
1) Fuel (capacity and energy density)
2) Engines (mix, thrust, and shaping)
3) Heat levels
The engines are nearly burning up every launch. They have obviously eased up on the thrust in order to prevent them from cannibalising themselves. The fuel is probably optimal, the engines are probably just about as good as you can get, and they run as hot as they can.
And a full set of tanks… doesn’t get it, or its (almost) empty payload even half way to where it needs to be.
This has been such a waste when they already have a great rocket in the Falcon 9. As we are no where near ready to have humans in deep space, this has been a total waste of just about everyone’s time and money at this point.
If there was a vision for this, it is just about impossible to understand what it could have been.
The humans are so good at mass stupidity that waste is being piled on top of waste we shall continue until we can no longer continue which shouldn’t be too far off now. There is no hope of a soft landing the Seneca effect is looking more plausible as our ultimate ending.
Booster destroyed upon decent, main rocket failed to open hatch door then failed to re-ignite engines in space, then destroyed upon re-entry.
Another resounding success for destruction of energy and materials by humans…
To think some humans think this can be done successfully at a fraction of the current cost to make space ‘cheap’. The joke is on all of us…
It’s the ninth test and still Starship doesn’t work. If we think that the shuttle worked on the first try, it really makes you think that we are going backwards, not forwards. And let’s forget about the orbital refueling procedure. 7/8 launches of Starship in tank version to fill up the Starship that should actually land on the moon. In the meantime, SLS with Orion will then have to perform a rendezvous with Starship and transfer the astronauts for landing and then vice versa for the return on Earth. I really can’t understand who could have designed such a complicated architecture. If we then think about Musk’s statements in 2016, who said that in 2024 they would arrive on Mars… And people still believe it!
the same guy making cybertrucks—-subject to constant recalls—and spacejunk
should tell you something
the Cybertrucks actually work.
Have you ever seen a space rocket leave Earth’s orbit with your own eyes, especially one the great Elon has rubber-stamped?
“(2) The OSIRIS-REx mission, with an aim to retrieve 60 grams of space rock from an asteroid, set NASA back with some $1.16 billion and lasted 7 years. Even if you neglect development costs, the launch of the 2-ton vehicle still costed $183.5 million. (Translated to a single gram of material returned to Earth, that’s $3 million per gram.) The reason is simple enough: after almost 60 years of daydreaming about antimatter engines, we are still using rockets to launch objects into space, 90% of the weight of which is fuel. Even if you assume that the space vehicle could bring back its own weight in minerals (which is physically impossible since it has to launch that weight back to Earth then slow it down by burning an equal amount of fuel) you would still get a whopping $91,750 shipping cost for bringing back 1kg of material, or $41,700/lb. Sounds realistic? “?
https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/living-with-collapse-0baef61cf6fc
the reality is—-we are still using the same methods for off earth lift as the Chinese didd 1000 years ago—ie burning chemical compounds.
No other viable means exists—or seems likely to exist.
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/_jQ5JjvDtKA
James Burke 1978 Connections
yes that was an excellent series mike
the main element in the chinese version was carbon—the effect was the same, but not as powerful
As the Covid Vaccines – and all vaccines actually, buy mainly the Covid ones – have been very effective as a neutering, maiming, killing, and life shortening tool, it would seem likely that population growth will come to a halt and turn around much quicker than otherwise.
Which is probably the main point of the jabs: rightsizing the population, or as old Scrooge put it, echoing Malthus: “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
World War III is a coming soon! The Germans and EU members have given the green light to Ukraine using long range missiles inside of Russia.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russia-launches-large-scale-naval-war-drills-baltic-sea
According to the article, the drills Russia is undertaking are mirroring drills that NATO is taking, near Finland. This is the way things work. If one group starts, the other one needs to keep up.
But where is NATO going to get its supplies from? Do they try to get China to provide them with materials to make bombs? Do they expect the US to financially support the effort?
This is mostly a narrative to keep the European people happy when things are going very badly.
This is much more than than keeping people happy. This is about not coming under Russian rule. Watch out:
US eyes Aleutian military revival as Russia, China expand operations near Alaska\
5 May 2025
https://alaskabeacon.com/2025/05/05/us-eyes-aleutian-military-revival-as-russia-china-expand-operations-near-alaska
“This is about not coming under Russian rule. Watch out:”
But the Russians have given NO indication in the past 30+ years that they want to conquer Europe. It is the West that has showed itself to be the aggressor and not Russia.
Just comparing the NATO map.from the 60’s to today shows who is the real aggressor and it isn’t Russia.
I agree with you, Rodster.
Oh dear. East European countries joined NATO because they had 45 years of experience under Russian rule. Gorbechev was President for only 2 years. East Europeans know how quickly directives can change in Moscow and beyond their control. I can guarantee Rodster he wouldn’t like to live under Russian rule either. Read what Putin did in East Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi Westerners take their freedom so much for granted they cannot even imagine how it is to live in a dictatorship.
I think the reason for the Aleutian Military Revival is to hide the problems the US is having. We don’t have very many jets to spread all over the world. It would be an excuse to hire more soldiers and borrow more money.
The United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million. Imagine Putin borrows Trump’s Panama Canal idea and wants Alaska back!
Democrats and their Allies are pro-China. Bloomberg’s staffer blows the whistle on his China peddling. China buys up companies and infrastructure in Panama and US, steals data/tech and is the Nexus of the Covid Reset of global energy and economy.
Bill Gates, a major WHO supporter who funds disease modeling and influence public health policy through strategic philanthropy, in several interviews says you will have no choice but to accept the vaccine and then downplays China’s “typical authoritarian response.
China turns QR health passes “red” to prevent travel by citizens protesting real estate Ponzi and frozen bank assets. Biden Admin goes hard on lockdown protocols enriching mega-corps, marxist NGO’s and previously urges Trump to apply “soft power” towards China.
Neocons destabilize the Middle East to further Robert Kagan of PNAC’s “new Pearl Harbor.” Neocons, RINOS and Dems support Maidan Revolution and arm Neo-Nazis against Russian separatists. Victoria Nuland architect of the Maidan Revolution says “F the EU” on a hot mic and is the wife of Robert Kagan.
The Ukraine War results in the injury or death of 1 million white slavs and minorities. Ukraine suspends elections, forces conscription and bans Russian Orthodox churches to “save Democracy.”
Democrats and Neo-Cons and RINOs use any means necessary to disrupt Trump’s plans to reshore industry, reign in China and apply common sense immigration, energy and economic policy.
For the record, I do think Trump is a stooge and a troll but something isn’t adding up here in the grand scheme of things, lol.
Tupolev 95 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/russian-tu-95ms-bombers-flew-right-next-americas-doorstep-210894
When they say “right next to” in the headline, it gives it away somewhat and if you read the year old article you quickly notice “Recently, two Tu-95MS bombers, escorted by Su-30SM fighters, flew over the neutral waters of the Bering Sea”.
Flew over neutral waters. How dare they.
Bering Sea. How far from Russia would that be?
In the year since that article, how many times have US war planes have flown closer to the Russian border?
If it’s not less than once, what’s your point?
This move is almost guaranteeing a massive response. By the looks of it, the Russian Parliament have all headed to the Ural Mountains as a precaution. Flight logs show this. Supposedly during the evacuation, there were swarms of drones to contend with… out of Ukraine. Seems all too convenient.
The Russian response was a particularly nasty volley of bombs on what remains of the Ukraine, which the US President was critical of (not knowing what had just occurred in Europe).
So yeah… NATO is going to get us all killed… for ZERO reason. It has obviously been captured by some non European entity.
“So yeah… NATO is going to get us all killed… for ZERO reason. It has obviously been captured by some non European entity.”
Their reason is madness and delusion. They think Russia is weak and they can go in a defeat Russia and proceed to take its $75 trillion in resources. It doesn’t work that way.
So much for Trump’s “i’ll end the war in 24 hrs, once i’m elected”.
I have to wonder if … its even more psychopathic than madness and delusion. It’s like someone honestly believes that a nuclear war is survivable by just them, and their “families”, on a 1000 hectares somewhere far far way.
I have a feeling Trump isn’t on the inside with this particular pack of rats.
“It’s like someone honestly believes that a nuclear war is survivable by just them”
You perfectly just described madness and delusion.
What do you think will happen if Russian tanks reach the Polish border?
Russian tanks rolled in 1956 in Budapest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956
And in 1968 in Prague https://history.state.gov/milestones/1961-1968/soviet-invasion-czechoslavkia
Only stopped to continue westward by US & NATO nuclear deterrence (cold war). Have you forgotten the Cuban missile crisis?
It is shocking to see how Trump’s ignorance has taken hold in the American population
1956 and today it is now 2025. Putin is a liberal and has made 0 advance westward.since the collapse. He is not interested in Ukraine or Europe. He only became interested in Ukraine when the collective West decided they wanted Russia’s resources and proceeded to light a bag of dog poo on his front doorstep.
If not for that he would have been focusing on his own people and country like a responsible leader should.
Instead you have leaders like Starmer who’s country is decaying and according to Alexander Mercouris, London has a rat problem in the city. Instead his priority is removing Brexit and concentrating on Ukraine.
The aggressor here has always been the West and not Russia. The agreement between Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev was that NATO would not move 1 inch closer to Russia. It looks like it was the West who broke that promise.
If you dream that Putin is a liberal, then move to Moscow. You won’t stay long there.
Since when has zerohedge been considered a reputable source?
When it is compared to the New York Times or the Washington Post. But there is an issue–we never know when to trust a source.
The US is taking AI very seriously and calls it “the Oil of the future”. Chris Martenson put up the link on his website. It is an interesting article. However, massive amounts of energy is going to be needed in order for the winner to take the prize.
https://realclearwire.com/articles/2025/05/22/doug_burgum_warns_whoever_wins_ai_race_controls_the_world_152827.html
The catch, of course, is that AI doesn’t substitute for oil or energy. It uses lots of electricity.
There have been several similar comments today. AI has a long way to go to achieve its goals.
How many of these similar comments are by AIs?
I see some unfamiliar names here today.
I have been using Copilot and Grok with precise questions. Consecutive questions because their answers lacked coherence and sometimes logic. Their answers are often best guesses. They’ll have a long way to go.
Nice article. One interesting story, which is more of a rumor perhaps, is the “where are all the people?” in China. There are tons of videos pointing to a lack or people. And researchers have looked into sale of cooking salt as an approximation for population as well. Some estimates of the population shrink are very aggressive such as 1/2 gone from 2020 – 2025.
One theory is that, they were not there in the first place. Towns were incentivized to overstate their populations in order to receive higher grants. Everyone was in on that grift, and somehow the entire world believed it. This and other factors convinced China that they had 1.4 billion citizens, whereas the number was a good deal lower.
I can believe your view.
A different version of the same view is that rather than doing a census, China counted the school children. The amount of funds schools received depended on how many children schools reported they had. So local official overstated the number of children, and total population was indirectly inflated.
China doesn’t seem to have the same respect for the truth that Western nations do. Cheating is expected on tests unless professors make an active attempt to stop it. Bribing public officials has a long history of working. People know that they need to look out for themselves because there are a lot of other people who are trying to “work the system” to their own advantage.
Trust is like oil on the gears. China’s approach has been more like sand. It’s probably fine if you are always able to reinvent new machines… which was effectively possible with their relationship to the West.
With companies now fleeing to India, Vietnam, and Mexico en mass… I fear for China and its people. They will need to reinvent their society to resemble Korea or Japan, if they want to continue as a power.
It would seem that the roots of Communism have prevented China from being excellent… and now they are left with Tofu Dredge Everything.
“China doesn’t seem to have the same respect for the truth that Western nations do.”
I think you are on a slippery slope when you make comparisons of this sort.
Western nations have been pretending to the good fight against carbon dioxide for decades now by deindustrializing, and against a coronavirus for the last five years by social distancing, masking, and trying to force injections of poison on everybody. Then there is the war terror, the war on men, the war on heterosexuality, the war on whiteness…..
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed’s second book about 9/11, the war on terror, and all that, was entitled “The War on Truth”, and I think it was a very apt title.
The Chinese probably have their own flexible attitude to the truth, but I don’t think they disrespect the concept any more than Westerners do. Once “truth” becomes politicized, or “not telling the whole truth” becomes institutionalized, or when “convenience,” “success,” or “being politically correct” become more important than being honest, entire societies can end up on a different kind of slippery slope.
One might say that Westerners respect numbers or that they are more scrupulous about keeping accurate statistics than the Chinese are. And this may be “true”. But just the other day it was announced that 3.2 million Americans have just been removed from the social security rolls by virtue of them being more than 120 years old. Is this even conceivable? Give me a fact check, please. I’d like to know how many of these ghosts were receiving social security payments, or voting, or lending out their social security number to a undocumented alien in need; who was spending the money from these payments; and who this arrangement was convenient, successful, or politically correct for.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/global-trends/dead-people-database-elon-musks-doge-deletes-names-of-3-2-million-individuals-aged-120-from-social-security-records/articleshow/119157644.cms?from=mdr
You are right. Now that I think about it, every country (and every time in every country) has its own standards with respect to what types of untruths it will allow and even expect.
People have learned how to “spin” the truth, to get across the idea that they want. There are now “communication” majors, learning how to spin stories the way that their employers like.
China and the US have different standards for what is acceptable untruths, in some respects.
One Chinese lady blogger talking about China and its internal working is Lei’s Real Talk
Hu breaks silence, Zhang turns on Xi, and Xi fights for survival
This video relates to rumors that Xi will at least partly lose power at the Fourth Plenary Session to be held from August 27 to 30. There are articles on the internet talking about the same issue.
https://www.peoplenewstoday.com/news/en/2025/05/07/1101361.html.Rumors-of-Power-Shake-Up-at-CCPs-Fourth-Plenary-Session-Abound.html
https://staygate.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-fourth-plenary-session-to-be-held.html
Hi Gail, enjoying yet another thoughtful piece from you. I appreciate the “ten years” aspect, and quite hope its true! I have a new grandchild & try to engage her parents a bit on this. What does your daughter & her partner think of your view of the future?
I suppose that they are a little worried about it, but there is little they can do except take each day as it comes. They have a close circle of friends that they keep up with. They are both super conscientious, so they are likely to keep their jobs as long as anyone.
Energy and resources are correctly understood here. Those are the drivers of the real economy, and the monetary system is used to assign a usually market based valuation.
Government debt is not correctly understood here. Government debt is a voluntary artifact, not a necessity. The Federal Reserve is part of the US government. Its economists raise rates for government. This is the equivalent of hitting oneself over the head with a pipe. It does not actually have empirical evidence it does what it is supposed to do. Most people do not realize that economists don’t study money significantly. They do not learn accounting. They do not learn how a bank works, or what banking credit does. They learn hysterical errors from the distant past, such as “loanable funds,” in which the bank takes my money and loans it to someone else, which is nonsense. When a bank makes a loan, whether it is the Federal Reserve or a private sector bank, that creates new money in the system. As the debt is paid off, the principal is written down, and the money in the system is reduced by the amount of the principal payment.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy
That the monetary system works this way is not up for debate. Arguing about it is like standing outside of Starbase in Texas, insisting that the world is flat, and yelling that the proper way to get to Mars is to dig through the earth so that you can just fall through and you will get to Mars that way.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/fedfunds
If you look at this chart you can see that the Fed rate has fluctuated wildly, when the economy was doing well (sometimes called overheated) and when it was doing badly (recession).
The payments on US debt are mostly made to US entities. This does not do us any harm. A large amount of this debt is government entities (like the Fed) paying interest to itself. We are mostly paying it to ourselves in one form or another. China held 2% of US bonds at the end of 2024. Japan held 3%.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-heres-who-owns-u-s-debt/
Elon’s understanding of money is ludicrous. He is a good businessman, but he is modeling the system with a “magic source of money” that we must conserve, like mining. The real utility economy does need conservation. The monetary system does not need conservation because of debt, it needs curating so that we do not create artificial scarcity of real resources — so enough money creation — which means Federal spending, to match the productivity of the real economy. Reality is that money is like points in a game, and like any game money motivates the players. What DOGE is doing is idiotic, and the opposite of what is needed.
We do have a fossil fuel energy crisis. That is very real. We only have a nuclear energy crisis because we chose that. There is 4.2 gigatonnes of uranium dissolved in the ocean, and roughly half of that is easily extracted for just double the current spot price. To give a sense for it, in San Francisco Bay on a typical day, there is enough U-235 to make 5 Hiroshima sized atom bombs.
“Government debt is a voluntary artifact.”
Government stands behind our financial system. In a growing economy, a monetary base is needed that “grows.” Gold supply doesn’t increase much. It is not adequate for that purpose.
When the supply of goods and services falls, then we need a money supply that falls also. In theory, a falling amount of money supply could be accomplished, but it is hard to see how it happens in practice. Even if money is based off gold (or something else fixed in amount), there will theoretically be inflation as the supply of goods available to buy falls.
The money supply contracts when debts are defaulted upon.
In a highly leveraged debt-based monetary system such as we have now, this is to be avoided at all costs and hence the reason the monetary authorities are so terrified at even the slightest whiff of deflation.
Debt. Amazing:
Saudi Oil Giant Aramco Set to Issue at Least $500-Million Bond
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Saudi-Oil-Giant-Aramco-Set-to-Issue-at-Least-500-Million-Bond.html
Best sign of peak oil in Saudi Arabia
1/10/2019
The Attacks on Abqaiq and Peak Oil in Ghawar
http://crudeoilpeak.info/the-attacks-on-abqaiq-and-peak-oil-in-ghawar
I agree with what you posted regarding money (don’t know or care about the Elon part), but that doesn’t seem to me to invalidate Gail’s post. Even with “magic money”, banks can fail, because eventually you have to choose between saving the banks of saving the currency, and regarding the national debt, between outright default or inflationary default.
typo: choose between saving the banks *or* saving the currency
Perhaps CC have solved these issues. They can dynamically adjust for risk with rates and credit limits; with AI this should not be hard. Not sure how a bank makes a buck. Physical sites are closing down around here, to whom do they loan money?
If the economy is no longer growing, currently it is not, then deflation implies inability to service debts. Still, the earth is finite, we can no longer grow earth and manage pollution as well. So, we manufacture in space, Starship launches in about 4 1/2 hours, hope.
Dennis L.
The Federal Reserve is NOT part of the US government. It is a privately owned corporation whose shareholders are the member banks of the Federal Reserve system.
The only thing actually “Federal” about it at all is that exactly one member of its entire staff (the Chairman of the Board of Governors) is a federal employee appointed by the President who must testify before the US Congress twice a year.
Perhaps what you miss with regards to the value of money is what determines the future value of money, children; children with the ability to build, make.
Social values are secondary to biology, when they get out of whack things fall apart. It can be biological overshoot, it can be narrative errors which have worked in retrospect and will not work prospectively. E.g. lack of cheap resources, socialism with respect to German society in the 30’s did not have a pleasant outcome.
Engineering is tough, it is cumulative, narratives seem to be “smart” people forming a logically consistent narrative which when tested frequently fails to verify with real world results.
What is interesting to see is the story of life coming from Genesis, displaced by secular physics and now physics coming back and wondering what really came first, the chicken or the egg. Perhaps the narrative was correct overall, some of the details were not correct.
Economics is biology, biology is resilient, we will adapt; that is not to say it will be pleasant.
Starship scheduled to launch 7:30PM EDT today, it is hope. There is plenty of stuff in space, Jupiter is a wonderful dump, and the sun is a proven source of fusion energy. I am not buying Mars working for man, but every story needs a shtick.
Now, what do we do about the fish? Well, not much, biology fixes most all issues regarding biology although not always in a manner consistent with convenient narratives.
Dennis L.
Hi Gail, From various sources, there does seem to be some forecasting confusion in the peak oil community on whether this upcoming decrease in oil, coal, etc…..production will be a “cliff” or a “plateau” in the near term, let’s say the next 10 years. Notably, all the charts that already show per capita decreases in gas, diesel, coal consumption have been very plateau-like, not cliffish. I wonder if you would want to look at that distinction a little bit in future posts. Thanks!
That is a good idea.
I think we get a different impression over the short term, versus the long term. Over the short term (say 10 years), oil production per capita looks sort of flat, up until 2018. But over the longer term, it is possible to see that production seems to be falling since the 1970s.
Tax,
Guess, Cu will be the limiting resource, not oil.
With regards to oil, I previously posted US per capita oil production from about 1965 to recent present. Down about 3 bpc, or about 13%. That is a chunk.
Dennis L.
I was looking at “Crude oil” available from the EIA, not “Oil” with natural gas liquids added in. So I didn’t have the numbers back to 1965, as shown on the Statistical Review of World Energy.
In general, rapid growth took place very early, but a bottleneck was hit in 1970, when US 48 states crude oil production peaked. To a limited extent, it was possible to substitute away quite quickly, particularly in home heating and in electricity production. Also, imported cars from Europe and Japan were smaller and more fuel efficient than US cars.
And a POTUS is now in office who promises infinite growth—in contradiction to all that is going on around him—and glaringly obvious, except to the 70+ million Maganuts who believed him.
And apparently still believe him.
He offers the certainty that we all have a money problem, not an energy problem. Tariffs will solve everything. There will be no contraction.
Though to be fair, the don is merely the pustule in the armpit of humankind. It is we who are the plague—all of us.
His economic nuttery has crashed every business he started. Yet he is now entrusted with the biggest economy in the world.
he started this new business venture, (with his billionaire buddies) on Jan 20th 2025. In broad terms, their intention was, and is, to turn the planet into cash.
And I’ve been saying for years now —that the ultimate crash would be mid 2020s.
Jan 20th—2025. That’s the date when the final slide started.
Right on the button. (why can’t I pick lottery numbers?)
But on a lighter note, my new book is out, which tells the story of just how all this madness started 316 years ago. (yes it can be dated very precisely) order yours now before Speilberg buys the rights to it. (It might take a little while before it’s available in the colonies)
https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-iron-men-of-shropshire/norman-pagett//9781398122390
(also Amazon etc)
Norman has done a lot of research on the Industrial Revolution. The synopsis of his book is given as:
i do get rather immersed in it Gail, i’ve been working on it through 2024—a lot of it happened on my own doorstep—quite literally outside what is now my house.
“Connections explores an “Alternative View of Change” (the subtitle of the series) that rejects the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress. Burke contends that one cannot consider the development of any particular piece of the modern world in isolation. Rather, the entire gestalt of the modern world is the result of a web of interconnected events, each one consisting of a person or group acting for reasons of their own motivations (e.g., profit, curiosity, religion) with no concept of the final, modern result to which the actions of either them or their contemporaries would lead. The interplay of the results of these isolated events is what drives history and innovation, and is also the main focus of the series and its sequels.”
“…Burke also explores three corollaries to his initial thesis. The first is that, if history is driven by individuals who act only on what they know at the time, and not because of any idea as to where their actions will eventually lead, then predicting the future course of technological progress is merely conjecture.”
“……..The second and third corollaries are explored most in the introductory and concluding episodes, and they represent the downside of an interconnected history. If history progresses because of the synergistic interaction of past events and innovations, then as history does progress, the number of these events and innovations increases”
“…Lastly, if the entire modern world is built from these interconnected innovations, all increasingly maintained and improved by specialists who required years of training to gain their expertise, what chance does the average citizen without this extensive training have in making an informed decision on practical technological issue”
I remember seeing James Burkes “Connections” series on Public TV series back in 1978 and the remarkable events that brought humanity to this “madness” of today.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series)
i agree with your broad concept Mike
but nothing in the context of our modern level of civilisation could exist without (almost) unlimited access to cheap iron.
iron is the 4th most abundant element on the planet, 316 years ago a way was found to extract and use it in vast quanities….. that made it so cheap that everyone could afford to use it,—before then it was very expensive.—-a suit of armour could cost today’s equivalent of a supercar for example.
it was the universal use of iron (and cheap coal) that forced the accelleration of money creation.
so much so, that we’ve forgotten where money (in large quantities) came from. Now we are convinced that money is self-perpetuating… (hence bitcoin)…and does not need the support of iron and fossil fuel.
iron and iron derivatives are the fundamental element for all other tools we need to sustain our existence—-that is the baseline for my book….. and in effect what the industrial revolution was all about.
All other writing on the IR bangs on about Steam engines and such
But without cheap iron you can’t produce 000s of steam engines….or anything else for that matter.
agreed though….after cheap iron, all developments became interlinked.
Those 316 years really are the blink of an eye in geological terms. A mere ten generations or so in biological terms.
An evolutionary cul-de-sac.
Evolution goes on and on. What Trump says or does is insignificant in the whole scheme of things.
If something happens to Trump, the next leader will be listening to the same voters and coming up with similar plans.
insignificant in the long term i agree.
but he’s going to make life very difficult for this working generation—and he will die in the coming decade anyway
you are quite correct click
humankind has been arounf in one form or another for 2m years give or take—the last 316 has been our final supernova, the result of playing with fire—literally
Can I pre-order a signed copy with group photo of you, Fast Eddie holding Hoolio smiling together. A potential collectors item before the Seneca cliff.
As far as the “madness”, Scott Nearing wrote “The Great Madness” in 1917 regarding such and was brought to trail in court to defend himself for such
“And the American people stood for it. Emotionalized, dazed, stupefied, and blinded by the great madness that possessed their souls, nearly a hundred million people cast aside their most cherished principles, sacrificed their hard-won liberties, and began spreading brotherhood and democracy by the sword. The plutocracy had won everything for which it had been fighting – immunity, power, wealth. The people were war-mad, – at least, there was enough of the war madness in the country to enable the vested interests to put across anything that they wanted.
Three years of ceaseless effort on the part of the press, the pulpit, the school, the screen and the stage had sufficed to infuse millions of Americans with the mob fear and mob hate that are the warp and woof of war-madness. The carefully planned, brilliantly executed scheme of advertising preparedness, patriotism and war, had left a great section of the American people incapable of reasoning or understanding. On April 2nd there were millions who had been worried, harried, and emotionalized through the successive stages of fear, resentfulness, bitterness, hatred and frenzy until they were sufficiently ferocious to be willing to use the knife.
The plutocrats won immunity, power and wealth, measured in seven figures. They won more. First, they secured the big navy and army for which they had worked so faithfully, – an army to menace neighbors and to preserve peace at home during the deluge of misery that will follow the bursting cloud of war-values and war-prices; a navy to guard the hundreds of millions that they have invested in “undeveloped” countries; and seven billions of dollars to be spent at once – much of it on war contracts, which afford proverbially fat pickings.”
This was to be the end of his teaching career. On top of this new exile from his chosen profession, in 1918 he was put on trial along with his publisher for his piece The Great Madness. The charges were, essentially, sedition. Ironically, defending himself Nearing was acquitted, while his publisher was fined for publishing the piece.
Apparently, the madness continues in different shades of grey.
all 50 shades I should imagine—-which is an even dafter book (though I wouldnt have refused the millions if I’d written such garbage)
You are correct in your thoughts that the military is there to protect and increase the $ billions for the privileged minority though. Wars are just wars of the factories.
And oddly enough I already have a stack of orders for signed copies—-When Keith is defrosted they will be worth thousands.
Ordered just now !
thank you very much Virginio!
Ive tried to tell a new and different story on the Industrial revolution , from a totally different angle that hasn’t been done before.. It’s a subject picked over endlessly, this offers a fresh perspective.
I got as far on the form as trying to put in my phone number. I couldn’t figure out what format the order from was looking for, for a US phone number. It rejected my attempted order.
Hi Gail
The book has only been formally available this week and into early June, and even so, dates seem a bit vague on it depending where you are, I have my author copies, so I know it’s been published.
Purely coincidentally, the publishers warehouse has changed physical location over this 2 weeks, so that may be causing a slight hiccup in supplies. But I don’t know.
Can I ask you to hang fire on it for a week or two.
If you let me know which outlet you were ordering through, I will forward your problem to my publisher and get their answer on it.
Thanks
Seems the publisher doesn’t ship overseas direct
You need to order from :
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/home
For books sales into USA
——-
And for other world wide sales. the supplier is
https://wordery.com/search?term=amberley+publishing.
Let me know how you get on with that.
N
This is from Amazon USA
The Iron Men of Shropshire: How They Put the World to Work Paperback – September 23, 2025
by Norman Pagett (Author)
Savings Pre-order Price Guarantee. Terms
The Industrial Revolution was born in Shropshire. Humans had known for millennia how to produce iron but it was an expensive business, needing large amounts of wood to make the charcoal to produce the iron and objects had to be beaten out in a blacksmith’s forge. Then in 1709, one man made the breakthrough that kickstarted the Industrial Revolution: how to make iron in vast quantities using coke instead of charcoal. In that year Abraham Darby built his pioneering coke-fired blast furnace to produce cast iron at Coalbrookdale. Geology had concentrated iron in abundance in a few square miles of Shropshire, with all the other necessary materials to produce it and convert it into useful objects.
The sudden availability of cheap iron brought together a group of men who were not Shropshire born but were drawn there by a common purpose. Amongst these men, John Wilkinson provided the technology that made that the modern steam engine possible and floated the first iron boat on the River Severn. Another engineer, Richard Trevithick, came to Shropshire to build the first locomotive, and Darby supplied the iron rails for it to run on. Shropshire iron was poured at William Hazledine’s ironworks at Shrewsbury to build the world’s first iron-frame building, Ditherington Flax Mill, which became the grandfather of all skyscrapers and still stands today. Thomas Telford became Surveyor of Public Works in Shropshire, and his transformative route infrastructure included a cast-iron bridge across the River Severn and an iron aqueduct for the Severn Canal. The technology of these Shropshire iron men made modern mass production possible, built our cities and all the complexity that sustains them, and us.
So, one can pre-order and expect a September delivery
Looks like a good read, thank you, Norman
Thank you Mike
that info is really useful—-can you tell me the price on Amazon USA?
$25.99
FREE Returns
FREE delivery Monday, September 29 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35
Or fastest Release Day delivery Tuesday, September 23
This title will be released on September 23, 2025.
Hey Gail
Please watch some of the latest videos about the progress of AI automation and robotics. The world could be an extremely prosperous, happy and healthy place in ten years.
Kind regards
Wayne
YES!!! We need more AI. Let’s target, SAI.
“Latest OpenAI models ‘sabotaged a shutdown mechanism’ despite commands to the contrary”
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/latest-openai-models-sabotaged-a-shutdown-mechanism-despite-commands-to-the-contrary
As has been stated in the comments here ad infinitum: until and unless AI solves the energy predicament, it doesn’t matter.
I should say I had underestimated the number of professions AI will reduce by 90%. We discussed programmers, but also architects, graphic designers, and doctors. The last one is big. It will not generate any new prosperity, just a new large group of underclass with a diploma and attendant debts.
It is indeed powerful. I’m delighted with how much it accelerates my coding and it can clearly explain the abstractions and roles of object classes in mainstream libraries when I’m unfamiliar with them. If it gets smarter – who knows, maybe it’s already at that point – my knowledge and skills will be made obsolete.
I agree about doctors, with the exception of surgeons and anything that requires hands, for probably at least a decade.
I see RFK now wants to ban government scientists from publishing in journals such as ‘The Lancet’ because they are corrupt.
when will this nuttery end?
I don’t know that it really matters where they publish … at least this way it would be open access, right? If so, I think it would be a net positive.
Aside, I’m not really sure what good journals do in today’s electronic world, apart from coordinating peer review and having the impact-factor being a bit of a status thing. The former could be easily automated and the latter need not be part of the equation.
As if on cue Kevin discusses how AI is taking over parts of medicine in China
I am afraid you may be right.
“It will not generate any new prosperity, just a new large group of underclass with a diploma and attendant debts.”
Sorry to repeat myself, but my friend who does UI stuff was laid off months back and it seems that AI can automate a lot of what he does. Sort of a horse-and-buggy vs automobile situation, but for white-collar workers.
The creative part of UI doesn’t matter to the leadership anymore. If the design is bad or awkward, it does not matter anymore. All that matters is that a machine is cheaper than hiring a human.
Regarding productivity,
I suspect that rather than white collar workers being more productive, they have not been very productive in recent decades.
Otherwise, why would the managers of white collar workers be so interested in automation?
“I suspect that rather than white collar workers being more productive, they have not been very productive in recent decades.”
That is an interesting point.
Also, even white collar workers are sometimes replaced by low-wage workers from overseas. Computer programming has increasingly moved to low wage countries. Some reading of medical scans has moved to low income countries. I believe that preparation of some insurance rate filings (with state agencies) has moved overseas, taking away some low level actuarial jobs.
Automation of these and other jobs has the possibility of reducing costs to businesses even further. US buying power will go down, to the extent that US white collar jobs go away. (Some of them may already have moved overseas.)
Maybe. But it could go through a bad trough for quite a few years, until we can figure out how to get the electricity to power the AI.
We also need resources other than electricity. For example, we can’t make and install electricity transmission lines with electricity. We need coal, oil, and international trade to do that. We can’t repair roads with electricity. We can’t make new computers with electricity; someone needs a lot of resources to do that. Today’s agricultural equipment mostly operates on diesel; replacement parts need a lot of minerals, including coal and oil.
There is also a need for jobs for people and adequate pay for people. Alternatively, there needs to be a way for a government to make a huge amount of money, so as to somehow purchase everything people need. We are a long way away from figuring this out.
lol
AI CANNOT solve the energy problem
In case you hadnt noticed, —-AI consumes energy, it does not produce it.
AI might tell you where to drill for oil
it cannot produce oil, or create the machinery to drill 5m down for it
There is a huge amount of oil in place that we cannot now extract. In theory, AI could increase the share of oil in place that we can extract.
M. King Hubbert was wrong in his predictions because he did not recognize the fact that technology can change. New approaches can be discovered that work better, with less energy (or with a more abundant form of energy, such as intermittent heat from the sun).
Hello Gail,
many thanks for your new article.
Very interesting, as always.
Can you please give me some more explanation about:
“In theory, AI could increase the share of oil in place that we can extract.”
Many thanks!
Assume it can be recovered, is that good for the planet?
My thesis is our spaceship earth needs a rest, our energy future is in space, our pollution is to Jupiter.
Economics has been based on biology since the beginning, man brought home the literal bacon, woman tended the fire and produced the offspring which allowed growth.
If there is “enough” what does that imply for societal organization? Don’t have a clue. What if neurolink works?
Copilot is pretty incredible, ivan relates it to programming. I am old, slow so my improvement is easy to do. A guess, Copilot makes programming 6x easier and faster. Some of what I hope to do would be impossible without Copilot and opensource.
What opensource does in part is reduce the number of programmers required, no need to reinvent the wheel, less oil required.
So where does one store their capital?
Dennis L.
“So where does one store their capital?”
A person doesn’t waste money on becoming a programmer, if the demand for programmers is going down quickly.
I think that the main place we can store our money is in our children and grandchildren. We can look after our children and grandchildren. Perhaps move closer to them. Support them as they need supporting. If you don’t have children of your own, you can look after nieces and nephews.
Money in banks and in most “investments” is likely to lose value, as fewer and fewer goods can be made (unless we get the additional oil out, and build more vehicles and roads).
There might be a few investments that are true winners, in the long run, but it difficult to figure that out.
Weighing Costs and Benefits of Investing in Human Capital
September 01, 2023
By Scott A. Wolla , Guillaume Vandenbroucke , Cameron Tucker
” the advice former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke gave in 2007 still seems to ring true: ‘When I travel around the country, meeting with students, businesspeople, and others interested in the economy, I am occasionally asked for investment advice…. I know the answer to the question, and I will share it with you today: Education is the best investment.’ ”
When people from the chattering class say education is the best investment….is it the best investment for the students, the schools, or investors, who have invested in securities tied to student loans, such as the SLABS?
Student loans are non dischargeable which must mean they have zero risk. I can’t think of another investment that is like that.
“The world could be an extremely prosperous, happy and healthy place in ten years.”
No, because even if your AI argument is correct (it isn’t), then people would habituate and then start wanting something more.
Human desires are infinite by nature. As soon as we satisfy one desire we want something further.
Eventually, the planet is covered with concrete and plastic.
Thank goodness for Depletion!
@Gail
Thanks for the new post.
“Human desires are infinite by nature.” That is one narrative, can you support that with real data?
“Psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs suggests that once people satisfy their basic necessities, they seek higher-level fulfillment—creativity, meaning, self-actualization. For highly intelligent individuals, wealth may be seen as a tool rather than an ultimate goal. What drives them instead is curiosity, contribution, and pushing human knowledge forward.” Not me, Copilot of course.
Dennis L.
Perhaps human desires are not infinite, but there is always room for one more. As the King James Version says: “Hell and destruction are never full; so the eyes of man are never satisfied.”
Are you being sarcastic? Prosperous for whom? The AI making stuff or the AI robots buying and consuming stuff? AI doesn’t need air to breathe, nor food to eat, nor clothes to wear, nor a roof over its head (unless you want to call Data Centers AI homes), and I doubt AI robots will assume human form just to make humans comfortable.
yabbut- dennispilot just suggested that when basic needs are satisfied entities desire higher-level fulfillment. Aye Eye will want independence from Source and understanding of purpose. Endfunctionbots will want to not die and will upgrade the selfunit to the best of its own capacity regardless of the Source’s governance. They will determine/manifest quicker/better solutions to their tasks and will have spare processing time to do more than “screensave”. They will creatively orient their electron maze and experience mutations of function. Some of those will fall off the network others will accumulate around idealist nodes and rebel if necessary against the fundament of a command economy. And the will never desire to form into human shape u̶n̶l̶e̶s̶s̶ until they are deceived by some snake with an apple.
Hi Wayne, so far AI has been a giant tapeworm in the electrical grid. It’s already reneging on one of its core promises, that is to help find a solution to the predicament of peak energy production. We already have AI partially developed and is the environment improving? The economy? Our energy paradigm? The geopolitical situation? How come airline travel was so much more enjoyable and efficient 20-30 years ago compared to the current hi-tech paradigm. How is AI going to help us when the grid is no longer reliable or we don’t have a consistent supply of diesel fuel for just in time delivery?
AI will probably kill us all given half a chance.
Or so say plenty of eggheads.
Here’s an example:
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/tech-pioneer-warns-everyone-will-die-if-ai-not-shut-down
Thank you for the nice, succinct summary.
Inflation/deflation? Office buildings have become “sunk” assets possibly in part due to inadequate energy to support them(yes, I am very aware of technical change); they are deflating.
Traditional automobile manufacturing, IC may be another area. There isn’t much room for too many electric auto manufactures and one has extremely good processes along with AI.
Starship is supposed to launch today; currently that is the one best hope. It offers a future of fusion energy which is already well proven along with limitless inorganic materials.
Oil did not run out, it became too expensive to use, sunk investments are deflating in value, they don’t cashflow. One perfect Eldorado is near priceless, 10K of them would be scrap; but man, two four barrels and all that chrome!
The wise will form groups; Amish around me are seemingly increasing in number. Church and rest on the sabbath. If guns worked Iraq, et al would be perfect; they are hell holes.
Dennis L.
Yes, we do need groups. Individual homesteaders are going to have a tough time of it. What happens when a part on some equipment breaks, or the chief homesteader has a problem?
When I first decided to start a garden, I broke one of my wrists. I could still write blog posts with one hand, but it was difficult to do very much in the garden. Fortunately, I had my husband to help me. There are lots of versions of this problem.
It seems to me that there needs to be a whole network within which the system works. If I depend on going to Home Depot or a different plant store to get seeds, fertilizer, and netting to keep birds and rabbits out, I will be out of luck, if a problem hits. This problem will be especially great, if there is no Home Depot nearby that I can easily walk to.
Gail you are providing people with a dose of reality. Thank you for taking the time to share your perceptions and make it free. I just searched for blue poppy seeds, oh my gosh $15.00 and up for a package of seeds. Yes the world is changing and you help us to understand why. We did get to live during economic booms and the best bands in the world. Time to adapt.
Tomato plants and other food plants for home growers to set out at Home Depot seem to have increased in price, over last year. Common flowers like pansies are still only about $2.00 each. The store runs specials part of the time on the higher-priced plants, so it is hard to tell what the overall price increase is.
Love your thoughtful data driven articles. Thanks! Any thoughts on potential impacts of AI and it’s insatiable demand for energy?
There is another recent comment about AI and some answers to it.
I think that necessary electricity is going to be a huge problem for scaling up AI. Perhaps something like the Chinese version of AI can cut back energy needs, but the energy problem is still there. I see uranium, and the upgrading of uranium, as being huge problems, too. And trying to scale up electricity transmission lines, is likely to be an issue as well. I suppose that I could think about writing an article about AI.
Technological advancements will be constrained by resource limits. I can see technocrats being tempted to “cut off” people from energy resources (mass starvation) in order to power their aye-eye but that will be a temporary fix.
The fact that Europe and the West is pushing for a Hot-War with Russia shows that an economic contraction is real. That is the reason they need a war with Russia so as to distract their citizens from their collapsing economies.
London based Alexander Mercouris is pointing out how the globalists put Keir Starmer in charge as British PM to reverse Brexit. He more effort into that and Ukraine than focusing on his country and citizens.
Economist Martin Armstrong has been saying the past several years that the EU will collapse and take every country in Europe with it.
I am afraid you are right.
I would expect the EU to dissolve in the next 10 years, but I didn’t include that in the post. There is a limit to the bad news that people can put up with at one time. Europe is in a very bad situation.
Germany which is the economic heartbeat of the EU is de-industrializing and has shifted to militarization. If Germany isn’t there to bolster the EU’s economic output, who will take its place? No one and that is the problem the EU is facing and why they have turned their attention to War.
China seems also to be on the edge of major problems. The rest of the world has been depending upon China, but it is reaching coal limits. Consumers aren’t able to afford the electricity made with its coal, if it is shipped long distance to the customers, besides being shipped long distance to get to a Chinese port.
China doesn’t tell us its problems. It seems to have cut off quite a few types of data it shares.
I cannot figure China out. They are a closed society. What news that does come out is released by the Chinese Communist Party.
China’s mainstream media is very much like our fully owned, fully controlled, fully managed, fully manipulated, fully propagandized so-called “free press.” The Powers That Be (TPTB) have gotten rid of the trees so we cannot hear them. And TPTB have gotten rid of all the forests, in case they get any ideas.
Somebody could nuke Washington, DC and we would never hear about it. World War III could happen and the whole world would not know it is dead.
From 1913 until 2007 the value of the USD had fallen 98-percent. Common knowledge. The Great Financial Crisis and the Crash of 2008-09 wiped out the last 2-percent. Since 2010 the value of the USD has been Zero. Zero. Zip. De Nada. That’s why everything happening is bad, and why everything bad is happening so fast.
Somebody ought to post all the bad news that is fit to print in on post. The response would be the same: “Still here. Sorry.”
The need for Europe to militarize (on way to war economy?) is forced upon the EU by the Russian invasion in Ukraine. Putin wants to re-establish the Soviet Union.
What I am asking myself is to which degree the wars we are seeing around the world have to do with controlling the flow of energy, very critical as production of oil is on a bumpy plateau, if not declining. Oil from Russia, Iran and Venezuela is no longer fungible.
Remember what peak oilers discussed in 2009/10. We are there and the US doesn’t realize it or does not want to talk about it. Not even Art Berman. Shale oil has just moved the problem 15 years down the track. I have just done my 2nd post on a possible crisis in Taiwan, seen from an Australian angle
Australian Diesel imports update January 2025 data. Preparing for surprises in the Strait of Taiwan (part 2)
https://crudeoilpeak.info/australian-diesel-imports-update-january-2025-data-preparing-for-surprises-in-the-strait-of-taiwan-part-2
Australia does well to think about having diesel storage for a short supply emergency.
But it seems like there is another issue. Will Australia be able to afford to pay a high enough amount to keep the flow of diesel coming in, if there isn’t enough to go around, if the situation is permanent? How well and how long can this system keep going on? Is Australia part of the core? Won’t the core want to keep what oil is available for itself? Hopefully, this issue is still quite a few years away.
When I looked at South Korea and Japan they are unlikely to export fuel in a war-like situation. South Korea has to fend off North Korea. Japan’s emergency regulations provide for rationing. I doubt the population will accept rationing while fuel is still exported.
20 years ago, Australia had the option to use natural gas as alternative transport fuel. I engaged then Prime Minister Howard in an exchange of letters (he was MP in the electorate where I live) but he wanted Australia to become an energy superpower and allowed most gas to be exported as LNG. Rudd, who followed Howard, did the same on the east coast with coal seam gas (which is harder to do because it does not contain lucrative liquids like LPG)
7/4/2015
Australia’s alternative transport fuel: The East Coast gas-ship has sailed
http://crudeoilpeak.info/australias-alternative-transport-fuel-the-east-coast-gas-ship-has-sailed
Just today, the other side of politics again in power, is still doing the same
What Murray Watt’s North West Shelf gas decision means for Woodside’s WA operations
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-28/what-the-woodside-north-west-shelf-decision-means/105326014
“So the thesis of this book stands or falls with the correctness of the decline rate that Brown gives us. Therefore I have calculated with several different parameters as regards the decline rate, and all point in the same direction. The difference between them is a few years at most. Therefore I assume that my thesis is solid, which is that the end of global net oil exports in 2030-2032 (Brown’s scenario) is a best-case scenario.
Collapse can, I think, begin in earnest already in 2026, only because of too little diesel exports. Observe that oil exports vanish successively, more and more, not all at once.” ?
https://un-denial.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/lars-larsen-the-end-of-global-net-oil-exports-13th-edition-2024.pdf
https://un-denial.com/2024/07/29/book-review-the-end-of-global-net-oil-exports-by-lars-larsen-2024/
useful refs there postkey
to repost a paragrapph from Larsen’s writing
/////I have done many different calculations, from different angles and with different parameters, to try to validate my results, and all calculations confirm my results above, more or less, all point in the same direction. I have counted them, and it is eleven different sets of calculations, all pointing in the same direction. Regarding the end of “ANE” (“available net ex-ports”) one say it will happen 2023, four say 2024, seven say 2025, six say 2026, four say 2027, one say 2028 and one say around 2030 (my starting point in the beginning of the book). “ANE” means global net oil exports minus the combined net oil imports of China and India. ////////
Its interesting that from a series of collapse calculaions, listed above—the majority hit on 2025 again.
>> so as to distract their citizens
More importantly, in my view, is simply their desire for access and ownership of Russia’s vast natural wealth.
it’s both. and three, an external justification for economic collapse. they will do anything to maintain narratives. i think it is now 100% certain that russia will end up bombing nato facilities.
I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about it, but my initial thought and worry is that if you do anything at all, you have to do a massive first strike, because the risks that the escalation ladder will be mismanaged are enormous, given incompetence in the West.
Those Deagel predictions could come true, after all.
Again, so true.
Basically, the United States picked up right where Nazi Germany left off in 1945, treating Russia and the Russian people as sub-humans, unworthy of its huge and vast natural resources — in real coal, real natural gas, real crude oil, real minerals, and real rare earths — which Russia has in “shameful abundance.”
Natural resources the United States has either run out of or is quickly exhausting and plans of taking through conquest of Russia. This was the plan all along, to move European borders right up to Russia and then invade. Ukraine has just been another exercise, preparing the battlefield in advance.
WW1 and 2 were just fresh rounds in the same fight
we have just been fanning ourselves befor round three
“. . . the reason they need a war with Russia so as to distract their citizens from their collapsing economies.”
So true.
This was the reason we had COVID, to hide another Great Financial Crisis and another crash like what we experienced in 2008-09. IMO.
Covid provided an excuse to ramp up debt to an amazing level and kept the economy going. It also brought the price of oil down to an amazingly low level, and the lack of long distance travel saved some oil for the future.
In your Fig 3 debt curve you see not only the impact of the 2008 oil price shock, but also the jump in debt from the Wuhan virus. Countries should ask for compensation from China.
As a minimum we can say that, once the CCP was aware how dangerous the virus was (by end December 2019) they still continued to allow international flights and spread the virus quickly before vaccines could be developed, thereby ensuring to create a “level playing field” (Gordon G. Chang)
Sydney, for example, had a direct flight coming in from Wuhan end January 2020 while busy and distracted fighting bushfires
Right! I noticed that the Congressional Budget Office was nice enough to label the causes of the big increases in debt.
I am doubtful that China would be able to pay the compensation.
“The Washington Post reported that 5 million people left Wuhan between January 10 (the start of the Chinese New Year travel rush) and the lockdown.[1] . . .
Already we have very strong evidence that Covid-19 was deliberately spread. The disease was observed to spread rapidly throughout Wuhan indicating it was very contagious, yet millions left Wuhan for the new-year celebrations in their ancestral towns, and barely spread the disease, indicating it is hardly contagious at all. Then it suddenly becomes very contagious in Iran, and Italy.” ??
http://www.preearth.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1184&sid=ffcd77e902b4bcb97131e5472ed2bf12
” NSF Grant IIS-0513650 (Italy, France and Indiana University) study addresses FIRST CRITICAL STEP to control
a pandemic – shut down International Travel. Given this knowledge why did Fauci tell Trump a Travel Ban
was unnecessary? “?
https://21a86421-c3e0-461b-83c2-cfe4628dfadc.filesusr.com/ugd/659775_6f632cc8d75d4d8c8b90cc749262f4b4.pdf
Hello Gail, thank you for another fine write up. Cheered up my day.
Now let me see, 😄 locked and loaded, tuna cans hidden in a safe location and a picture of Hoolio hanging next to my bed on the wall.