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The supply and demand model of economists suggests that oil prices might rise to consistently high levels, but this has not happened yet:
In my view, the economists’ model of supply and demand is overly simple; its usefulness is limited to understanding short-term shifts in oil prices. The supply and demand model of economists does not consider the interconnected nature of the world economy. Every part of GDP requires energy consumption of some type. The price issue is basically a physics issue because the world economy operates under the laws of physics.
In this post, I will try to explain what really happens when oil supply is constrained.
[1] Overview: Why Oil Prices Don’t Permanently Rise; What Happens Instead
My analysis indicates that there are three ways that long-term crude oil prices are held down:
(a) Growing wage and wealth disparities act to reduce the “demand” for oil. As wage and wealth disparities widen, the economy heads in the direction of a shrinking middle class. With the shrinking of the middle class, it becomes impossible to bid up oil prices because there are too few people who can afford their own private cars, long distance travel, and other luxury uses of oil. Strangely enough, this dynamic is a major source of sluggish growth in oil demand.
(b) Politicians work to prevent inflation. Oil is extensively used in food production and transport. If crude oil prices rise, food prices also tend to rise, making citizens unhappy. In fact, inflation in general is likely to rise, as it did in the 1970s. Politicians will use any method available to keep crude oil prices down because they don’t want to be voted out of office.
(c) In very oil deficient locations, such as California and Western Europe, politicians use high taxes to raise the prices of oil products, such as gasoline and diesel. These high prices don’t get back to the producers of crude oil because they are used directly where they are collected, or they act to subsidize renewables. My analysis suggests that indirectly this approach will tend to reduce world crude oil demand and prices. Thus, these high taxes will help prevent inflation, especially outside the areas with the high taxes on oil products.
Instead of oil prices rising to a high level, I expect that the methods used to try to work around oil limits will lead to fragility in many parts of the economic system. The financial system and international trade are particularly at risk. Ultimately, collapse over a period of years seems likely.
Underlying this analysis is the fact that, in physics terms, the world economy is a dissipative structure. For more information on this subject, see my post, The Physics of Energy and the Economy.
[2] Demand for oil is something that tends not to be well understood. To achieve growing demand, an expanding middle class of workers is very helpful.
Growing demand for oil doesn’t just come from more babies being born each year. Somehow, the population needs to buy this oil. People cannot simply drive up to a gasoline station and honk their horns and “demand” more oil. They need to be able to afford to drive a car and purchase the fuel it uses.
As another example, switching from a diet which reserves meat products for special holidays to one that uses meat products more extensively tends to require more oil consumption. For this type of demand to rise, there needs to be a growing middle class of workers who can afford a diet with more meat in it.
These are just two examples of how a growing middle class will tend to increase the demand for oil products. Giving $1 billion more to a billionaire does not have the same impact on oil demand. For one thing, a billionaire cannot eat much more than three meals a day. Also, the number of vehicles they can drive are limited. They will spend their extra $1 billion on purchases such as shares of stock or consultations with advisors on tax avoidance strategies.
[3] In the US, there was a growing middle class between World War II and 1970, but more recently, increasing wage and wealth disparities have become problems.
There are several ways of seeing how the distribution of income has changed.
Figure 2 shows an analysis of how income (including capital gains) has been split between the very rich and everyone else. What we don’t see in Figure 2 is the fact that total income (calculated in this way) has tended to rise in all these periods.
Back in the 1920s (known as “the roaring 20s”), income was split very unevenly. There was a substantial share of very wealthy individuals. This gradually changed, with ordinary workers getting more of the total growing output of the economy. The share of the economy that the top earners obtained hit a low in the early 1970s. Thus, there were more funds available to the middle class than in more recent years.
Another way of seeing the problem of fewer funds going to ordinary wage earners is by analyzing wages and salary payments as a share of US GDP.
Figure 3 shows that wages and salaries as a percentage of GDP held up well between 1944 and 1970, but they have been falling since that time.
Furthermore, we all can see increasing evidence that young people are not doing as well financially as their parents did at the same age. They are not as likely to be able to afford to buy a home at a young age. They often have more college debt to repay. They are less able to buy a vehicle than their parents. They are struggling to find jobs that pay well enough to cover all their expenses. All these issues tend to hold down oil demand.
Since 1981, falling interest rates (shown in Figure 6, below) have allowed growing wage disparities to be transformed into growing wealth disparities. This has happened because long-term interest rates have fallen over most of this period. With lower interest rates, the monthly cost of asset ownership has fallen, making these assets more affordable. High-income individuals have disproportionately been able to benefit from the rising prices of assets (such as homes and shares of stock), because with higher disposable incomes, they are more able to afford such purchases. As a result, since 1981, wealth disparity has tended to increase as wage disparity has increased.
[4] Governments talk about the growing productivity of workers. In theory, this growing productivity should act to raise the wages of workers. This would maintain the buying power of the middle class.
Figure 4 shows that productivity growth was significantly higher in the period between 1948 and 1970 than in subsequent years. Figure 2 shows that before 1970, at least part of the productivity growth acted to raise the incomes of workers. More recently, productivity growth has been lower. With this lower productivity growth, Figure 2 shows that wage-earners are especially being squeezed out of productivity gains. It appears that most of the growth attributable to productivity gains is now going to other parts of the economy, such as the very rich, the financial sector, and the governmental services sector.
The changes the world has seen since 1970 are in the direction of greater complexity. Adding complexity tends to lead to growing wage and wealth disparities. Figure 4 seems to indicate that with added complexity, productivity per worker still seems to rise, but not as much as when the economic system grew primarily due to growing fossil fuel usage leveraging the productivity of workers.
Figure 4 shows data through June 30, 2025. Note that productivity in the latest period is lower than in earlier periods, even with the early usage of Artificial Intelligence. This is a worrying situation.
[5] The second major issue holding oil prices down is the fact that if crude oil prices rise, food prices also tend to rise. In fact, overall inflation tends to escalate.
Oil is extensively used in food production. Diesel is used to operate nearly all large farm machinery. Vehicles used to transport food from fields to stores use some form of oil, often diesel. Transport vehicles for food often provide refrigeration, as well. International transport, by jet or by boat also uses oil. Companies making hybrid seeds use oil products in their processes and distribution.
Furthermore, even apart from burning oil products, the chemical qualities of petroleum are used at many points in food production. The production of nitrogen fertilizer often uses natural gas. Herbicides and insecticides are made with petroleum products.
Because of these considerations, if oil prices rise, the cost of producing food and transporting it to its destination will rise. In fact, the cost of transporting all goods will rise. These dynamics will tend to lead to inflation throughout the system. When oil prices first spiked in the 1970s, inflation was very much of an issue, both for food and for goods in general. No one wants a repetition of a highly inflationary scenario.
Politicians will be voted out of office if a repetition of the oil price spikes of the 1970s takes place. As a result, politicians have an incentive to hold oil prices down.
[6] Oil prices that are either too high for the consumer or too low for the producer will bring the economy down.
We just noted in Section [6] that oil consumers do not want the price of oil to be too high. There are multiple reasons why oil producers don’t want oil prices to be too low, either.
A basic issue is that the cost of oil production tends to rise over time because the easiest to extract oil is produced first. This dynamic leads to a need for higher prices over time, whether or not such higher prices actually occur. If prices are chronically too low, oil producers will quit.
A second issue is the fact that many oil exporting countries depend heavily on the tax revenue that can be collected from exported oil. OPEC countries often have large populations with very low incomes. Oil prices need to be high enough to provide food subsidies for an ever-growing population of poor citizens in these countries, or the leaders will be overthrown.
Figure 5 shows required breakeven prices for oil producers in the year 2014, considering their need for tax revenue to support their populations, in addition to the direct costs of production. The current Brent Oil price is only about $66 per barrel. If the breakeven price remains at the level shown in 2014, this price is too low for every country listed except Qatar and Kuwait.
No oil exporting country will point out these price problems directly, but they will tend to cut off oil production to try to get oil prices up. In the recent past, this has been the strategy.
OPEC can also try a very different strategy, trying to get rid of competition by temporarily dumping stored-up oil onto the market, to lower oil prices to try to harm the financial results of its export competition. This seems to be OPEC’s current strategy. OPEC knows that US shale producers are now near the edge of cutting back greatly because depletion is raising their costs and reducing output. OPEC hopes that by obtaining lower prices (such as the $66 per barrel current price), it can push US shale producers out more quickly. As a result, OPEC hopes that oil prices will rebound and help them out with their price needs.
I have had telephone discussions with a former Saudi Aramco insider. He claimed that OPEC’s spare capacity is largely a myth, made possible by huge storage capacity for already pumped oil. It is also well known that OPEC’s (unaudited) oil reserves appear to be vastly overstated. These myths make the OPEC nations appear more powerful than they really are. OECD nations, with a desire for a happily ever after ending to our current oil problems, have eagerly accepted both myths.
To extract substantially more oil, the types of oil that are currently too expensive to extract (such as very heavy oil and tight oil located under metropolitan areas) would likely need to be developed. To do this, crude oil prices would likely need to rise to a much higher level, such as $200 or $300 per barrel, and stay there. Such a high price would lead to stratospherically higher food prices. It is hard to imagine such a steep rise in oil prices happening.
[7] The third major issue is that politicians in very oil deficient areas have been raising oil prices for consumers through carbon taxes, other taxes, and regulations.
Strangely enough, in places where the lack of oil supply is extreme, politicians follow an approach that seems to be aimed at reducing what little oil supply still exists. In this approach, politicians charge high taxes (“carbon” and other types) on oil products purchased by consumers, such as gasoline and diesel. They also implement stringent regulations that raise the cost of producing end products from crude oil. California and many countries in Western Europe seem to be following this approach.
With this approach, taxes and regulations of many kinds raise oil prices paid by customers, forcing the customer to economize. Some of the money raised by these taxes may go to help subsidize renewables, but virtually none of the additional revenue from consumers can be expected to go back to the companies producing the oil.
I would expect these high local oil prices will slightly reduce the world price of crude oil because of the reduced demand from areas using this approach (such as California and Western Europe). Demand will be reduced because oil prices will become unaffordably high for consumers in these areas. These areas are deficient in oil supply, so there will be much less impact on world oil supply.
Refineries in China and India will be happy to take advantage of the lower crude oil prices this approach would seem to provide, so much of the immediately reduced oil consumption in California and Western Europe will go to benefit other parts of the world. But the lower oil world oil prices will also act to inhibit future world oil extraction because the development of new oil fields will tend to be restricted by the lower world oil prices.
The lower crude oil prices will be beneficial in keeping world food price inflation and general inflation down worldwide. Some oil may be left in place, in case better extraction techniques are available later, especially in the areas with these high taxes. With less oil supply available, the economies of California and Western Europe will tend to fail more quickly than otherwise.
Unfortunately, so far, these intentionally higher oil prices for consumers seem to be mostly dead ends; they encourage substitutes, but today’s substitutes don’t work well enough to support modern agriculture and long-distance transportation.
[8] Politicians at times have reduced oil demand, and thus oil prices, by raising interest rates.
One way to reduce oil prices has been to push the economy into recession by raising interest rates. When interest rates rise, purchasing power for new cars, and for goods using oil in general, tends to fall. Recession seems to happen, with a lag, as shown on Figure 6. Recessions on this figure are noted with gray bars.
Increasing interest rates has led to several recessions, including the Great Recession of 2007-2009. A comparison with Figure 1 shows that oil prices have generally fallen during recessions.
[9] The climate change narrative is another way of attempting to reduce oil demand, and thus crude oil prices.
The wealthy nations of the world have been spreading the narrative that our most serious problem is climate change. In this narrative, we can help prevent climate change by reducing our fossil fuel usage. This narrative makes trying to work around a fossil fuel shortage a virtue, rather than something that needs to be done to prevent calamity from happening. However, when we examine CO2 emissions (Figure 7), they show that world CO2 emissions from fossil fuels have not fallen because of the climate change narrative.
Instead, what has happened is that manufacturing has increasingly moved to the less advanced economies of the world. There is a noticeable bump in CO2 emissions starting in 2002, as more coal-based manufacturing spread to China after it joined the World Trade Organization in very late 2001.
The climate change narrative has made it possible to “sell” the need to move away from fossil fuels in a less frightening way than by telling the public that oil and other fossil fuels are running out. However, it hasn’t fixed either the CO2 issue or the declining supply of fossil fuels issue, particularly oil.
[10] The danger is that the world economy is growing increasingly fragile because of long-term changes related to added complexity.
Shifting manufacturing overseas only works as long as there is plenty of inexpensive oil to allow long-distance supply lines around the world. Diesel oil and jet fuel are particularly needed. The US extracts a considerable amount of oil, but it tends to be very “light” oil. It is deficient in the long-chain hydrocarbons that are needed for diesel and jet fuel. In fact, the world’s supply of diesel fuel seems to be constrained.
Without enough diesel, there is a need to move manufacturing closer to the end users. But what I have called the Advanced Nations (members of the OECD, including the US, most countries in Europe, and Australia) have, to a significant extent, moved their manufacturing to lower-wage countries. Fossil fuel supplies in countries that have moved their manufacturing offshore tend to be depleted. Trying to move manufacturing back home seems likely to be problematic.
The world economy is now built on a huge amount of debt. All this debt needs to be repaid with interest. But if manufacturing is significantly constrained, there is likely to be a problem repaying this debt, except perhaps in currencies that buy little in the way of physical goods.
When oil supply is stretched, we don’t recognize the symptoms. One symptom is refinery closures in some oil importing areas, such as in California and Britain. This will make future oil supply less available. Other symptoms seem to be higher tariffs (to motivate increased manufacturing near home) and increasing hostility among countries.
[11] Both history and physics suggest that “overshoot and collapse over a period of years” is the outcome we should expect.
Pretty much every historical economy has eventually run into difficulties because its population grew too high for available resources. Often, available resources have been depleted, as well. Now, the world economy seems to be headed in this same direction.
The outcome is usually some form of collapse. Sometimes individual economies lose wars with other stronger economies. Sometimes, wage disparities become such huge problems that the poorer citizens become vulnerable to epidemics. At other times, unhappy citizens overthrow their governments. Or, if the option is available, citizens might vote the current political elite out of power.
Such collapses do not happen overnight; they are years in the making. Poorer people start dying off more quickly, even before the economy as a whole collapses. Conflict levels become greater. Debt levels grow. Researchers Turchin and Nefedov tell us that food prices bounce up and down. There is no evidence that they rise to a permanently high level to enable more food to be grown.
Anthropologist Joseph Tainter, in the Collapse of Complex Societies, tells us that there are diminishing returns to added complexity. While economies can temporarily work around overshoot problems with greater complexity, added complexity cannot permanently prevent collapse.
[12] We need to beware of “overly simple” models.
The models of economists and of scientists tend to be very simple. They do not consider the complex, interconnected nature of the world economy. In fact, the laws of physics are important in understanding how the world economy operates. Energy in some form (fossil fuel energy, human energy, or energy from the sun) is needed for every component of GDP. If the energy supply somehow becomes restricted, or is very costly to produce, this becomes a huge problem.
As I see it, the supply and demand model of economists is primarily useful in predicting what will happen in the very short term. It doesn’t have enough parts to it to tell us much more.
For any commodity, including oil, storage capacity tends to be very low relative to the amount used each year. Because of this, commodity prices tend to react strongly to any fluctuation in presently available supply, or projected supply in the future. The supply and demand model of economists primarily predicts these short-term outcomes.
For the longer term, we need to look to history and to models that consider the laws of physics. These models seem to suggest that collapse will take place over a period of years, as the more vulnerable parts of the system break off and disappear. Unfortunately, we cannot expect long-term high prices to solve our oil problem.
Pakistan solar installation removing demand from the centralized grid:
https://x.com/hsu_steve/status/1960400606600040551
It certainly makes sense for farmers in India to provide irrigation using solar energy to operate the pumps, rather than diesel.
But it is unclear to me whether such solar energy needs to go through the electric grid. It would make a whole lot more sense for the farmer to buy solar panels for his own use. He might even hook up a battery, so he can run a few light bulbs off the solar energy at night. Pakistan is quite far south, so it is not troubled by solar supply being cut off for winter, or for needing a lot of heat in winter. So the whole system could operate independently of the current grid system.
Heads up. We can expect the Modi govt to fall in September or Modi will resign. A war is on between Modi and Ambani (India’s richest man). The govt through its proxy the Supreme Court has instituted an inquiry into a private zoo owned by Ambani’s son. Charges include money laundering. I cannot explain the fine details because for this one must be deeply immersed in the Indian political, caste and religious system. By the way from tomorrow the secondary tariff of 25% will be implemented on all Indian imports to USA in addition to the 25% primary tariff. Diamond and garment factories have shutdown.
Watch this also .8th September .
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/french-bonds-stocks-tumble-government-risks-new-collapse-weeks
This link is all about political problems in France.
French Bonds, Stocks Tumble As Government Risks New Collapse In Weeks
If correct, it’s interesting that India is in such a precarious position despite the high growth rate. Usually growth sweeps other problems under the rug.
The growth rate is a fraud . The govt changed the base year to 2022 after the Indian economy crashed by 22% in Covid . Anyway 90 % of the economy is in the unorganised sector for which there is no data . The data from the organised sector is used to make guessmates on the total GDP growth . Total crap just like IEA , EIA , IMF .
India steel production 2012-2024:
https://www.google.com/imgres?q=india%20steel%20production&imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.statcdn.com%2FStatistic%2F710000%2F714301-blank-754.png&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.statista.com%2Fstatistics%2F714301%2Findia-production-volume-of-crude-steel%2F&docid=giv7CV8fERA2LM&tbnid=4BAe6aSRxJSf_M&vet=12ahUKEwjXtuKxiKmPAxWIJjQIHYZaK9MQM3oECCQQAA..i&w=754&h=560&hcb=2&ved=2ahUKEwjXtuKxiKmPAxWIJjQIHYZaK9MQM3oECCQQAA
Growth in real measurables is real, but I won’t argue that growth might be overstated. Is your belief that it’s all fraud widely held by Indians?
India produces quite a bit of coal, and imports some more coal. This coal, plus iron ore, are what are used to produce steel. In fact, in the recent past, the US has exported some of its coal to India, presumably for such uses. (I haven’t checked recently.) India’s coal production rose by 7% in 2024, according to the 2025 Statistical Review of World Energy. China is stumbling. India is trying to step in, in this area.
Yes , no corporates use data provided by the govt for decision making , A private company CMIE ( Centre For Monitoring Indian Economy ) has much better data and not politically biased . Anyway data is unimportant in a country which houses more than 50% of the world’s illiterates .
Regarding steel production let me give you a scam . China is 30% cheaper so India put an anti dumping duty . The Indian steel mills floated shell companies in Nepal which is landlocked . Chinese billets were imported via the port of Kolkata in India by these shell companies avoiding anti dumping duties of India , The billets were trucked directly to the various steel plants in India for conversion in bars , rods and wire after custom clearance . This was also shown as Indian steel production .
Thanks Ravi
Obviously, this relates to governmental problems in India. Sounds worrisome.
India is a large coal producer and has huge reserves . The problem is the quality . It is mainly powdered and clinker coal used for low heat application . Coking coal and steaming coal needed for steel production and electricity is imported .
AI generated ;
India imports coal primarily from Indonesia, but also heavily from Australia, Russia, and South Africa. Other countries like the United States, Kazakhstan, and even Mongolia via Russia also contribute to India’s coal imports, depending on the specific type of coal (thermal or coking) and prevailing market conditions.
Top Sources of Indian Coal Imports
Indonesia: Remains the largest supplier of imported thermal coal to India.
Australia: A significant source of India’s coal imports, though its share can vary.
Russia: An increasingly important supplier, particularly of higher-quality thermal and coking coal, which India blends with domestic coal to improve efficiency and meet the needs of the steel industry.
South Africa: A major source of thermal coal for India, especially for the sponge iron industry.
Other Contributing Sources
United States: Contributes to India’s coal imports, with a notable increase in volumes between 2022 and 2023.
Kazakhstan: Also supplies coal to India, with growing import volumes.
Mongolia: India is considering importing coking coal from Mongolia through Russia.
Factors Influencing Import Sources
Coal Type:
India imports different types of coal for different industries, such as thermal coal for power plants and coking coal for steel production.
Price Competitiveness:
Changes in market conditions and pricing strategies by suppliers can influence which country becomes a more attractive source.
Domestic Policies:
Government policies aimed at boosting domestic production and increasing coal mine auctions also play a role in shaping India’s import landscape.
Marc “Crispy” Miller gets personal in this Substack article:
In memory of Giovanni Miller—born, in Chicago, on Feb. 22, 2012; then murdered, two months later, by the CDC
My nephew—whom I never got to see—died shortly after getting the six shots given to all two-month-olds in the US, as dictated by the CDC
Those six shots left the baby feverish and sluggish; then he had a nosebleed, and then died.
Just as the doctors always do when such things happen, they claimed the baby’s death was just a sad coincidence. Since there was a day or two between his vaccinations and his passing, they couldn’t chalk it up to “SIDS,” it having not been “sudden”; nor did they blame it on what they call “Shaken Baby Syndrome” when circumstances seem to make that diagnosis feasible.
https://markcrispinmiller.substack.com/p/in-memory-of-giovanni-miller
From the article:
Of course, this kind of narrative will make a fairly large group of people unhappy: the ones who believed everything they read in the newspaper in 2020 and 2021. They will say, “Of course, the CDC is trying for the best for everyone. Vaccines of all kinds are safe and effective.”
I would like to share with you this very interesting interview with Colonel Jacques Baud.
His analysis is enlightening and gives several historical references that are useful for our understanding.
Some of the topics covered:
– The issue of Jews of Eastern European origin in Israel (from Poland, Ukraine, Germany, Russia, etc.) and their racism towards Palestinians and their ultra-nationalism, which is identical by the way to the racism and ultra-nationalism now of the Ukrainians themselves towards Russians.
– The deliberate confusion made in Europe between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.
– Europeans’ racism towards Palestinians and Russians.
– The issue and history of Swiss and Austrian neutrality.
– The concept of neutrality through cooperation, rather than the Cold-War architecture based on military confrontation and threats, an issue understood now by Russians, but not by Europeans.
– The lack of understanding of the causes of the conflict in Ukraine by the Europeans and their continuous proposals for solutions that are not relevant or useful to solve the conflict.
– The role of the French, British, and Germans in wanting to continue the confrontation with the Russians.
– The issue of US debt and the willing to end non-repayable spending by US in Ukraine or other places.
US has now opened the door to the Russians, but they still don’t know exactly what to do with it; while the Europeans have suddenly found this door opened by US, but they don’t want it at all.
And various other very interesting historical and personal arguments and observations made by Col. Jacques Baud.
I am guessing that the issues being discussed are indirectly related to the problem of “not enough inexpensive fuels to go around.” The world population has always grouped together along something close to religious lines. When there wasn’t enough to go around, various groups would fight against each other. There has tended to be animosity among these groups.
After World War II, there was hope that all this could be put behind us. But now we are reaching new limits. Since the 1970s, the “push” has been toward increased complexity. That was when the US discovered that its oil supply was inadequate to continue its industrial growth.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/US-Industrial-Energy-Consumption-Per-Capita.png
Now we are returning to a situation of not enough to go around. At this point, high-complexity is also a problem. There is not enough fuel to keep sending as many goods across oceans. The US and many other countries are now against an excessive debt problem, as well.
It is interesting to note that during these days Italian politicians are underling that Italy has surpassed UK and Spain regarding GDP per capita.
And they are all happy.
I wonder if the issue is in reality due just because those two Countries are collapsing in a faster way than Italy or because our population is decreasing in a faster way than them.
Because Italian politicians are actually talking about a false indication of current good health of Italian economy.
Maybe, Gail, you have some real data about GDP, GDP per capita and population of UK, Spain and Italy, to reveal the trick.
In case , many thanks.
I am not sure if I have more informative data.
I haven’t read many of Ugo Bardi’s posts recently, but in the recent past he has complained about how his standard of living has gone downhill. He can’t afford the lifestyle his parents had. Ugo lives in Italy.
I think all of Europe has had a problem with falling standards of living. It is a matter of how much. My impression is that Italy has not added as many immigrants as some other parts of Europe, keeping its population growth down.
According to US population data, Italy’s peak population was in 2014. Spain’s population is still growing. UK’s population seems to be growing more rapidly than Spain, probably due to all of the immigrants. I expect that it is the population differences that are causing the confusion.
Dear Gail, about immigrants in Italy I can tell you that the flow of them remains very high, expecially because it is easy to come to Italy by see from north Africa or by walk from the Balkans, so there are also the unregistered oness.
The issue in my view is more related to the high percentage of people dying in silence, after Covid vaccination.
I can tell you that just in my building which is made of 20 apartments, 6 people died over 50 after three doses (I knew them personally), for sudden death, serious diesease or turbo cancer, three apartments still remain empty, two have been replaced with younger people and one is still occupied by the husband of the person who died.
Talking with friends, colleagues, clients or suppliers it is full of stories of people dead in the silence of little personal local stories or people whose health has been seriously compromised during the last three years.
So, probably, although immigrants are arriving, people have died in greater number than the flow in.
“ the Zionists used to fight against the
19:29 Jew. I mean you you have the case of the ghetto of Warsaw for instance where you had Zionist factions fighting with the
19:36 Germans against Jews in the ghetto of Warsaw.”?
‘As most of us know from our standard history books, the flashpoint of the conflict had been Germany’s demand for the return of Danzig. But that border city under Polish control had a 95% German population, which overwhelmingly desired reunification with its traditional homeland after twenty years of enforced separation following the end of the First World War. According to Taylor only a dreadful diplomatic blunder by the British had led the Poles to refuse that reasonable request, thereby provoking the war. The widespread later claim that Hitler sought to conquer the world was totally absurd, and instead the German leader had actually made every effort to avoid war with Britain or France.’?
https://www.unz.com/runz/the-true-history-of-world-war-ii/
Yes, Hitler was a dove of peace, just like Putin, LOL. Don’t speak on subjects you know nothing about.
all true. did he cover the part where h$tler refuses to go to war, and the brits start bombing germany? any parallel to the current situation?
Who ‘wants peace’?
“2019 RAND Paper . . .
As far back as 2019, US Army-commissioned studies examined different means to provoke and antagonize Russia who they acknowledged sought to avoid conflict. “
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqVPM0KSUpo&t=5s
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3063.html
Whatever history we read will reflect the views of the authors. History books are generally written by the winners.
Hello Gail. I’ve run the numbers on the outlook for the United States as an oil-producing country. If you’re interested in the spreadsheets and underlying assumptions, I can share them.
America’s fossil energy system is on its last legs.
You have at most 14 years of the fossil era left—probably less.
1. Not only because molecules are depleting through natural decline, but because the system around them is cracking. After a record in 2024/2025, oil and gas output is flattening. In the Gulf of Mexico, new projects such as Whale, Ballymore, and Shenandoah add a few hundred thousand barrels per day, but with a natural decline of roughly 6% per year, that buys only about three years of respite. Depletion then eats the gains. The shale basins show the same pattern: Tier-1 sweet spots are largely drilled out, costs are rising, well productivity is stalling, and private drillers are being absorbed in consolidation. The treadmill still turns, but slower—and with fewer replacement wells.
2. What accelerates the trend are variables spreadsheets often underweight. First, the erosion of the supporting ecosystem. It isn’t the well or the plant that decides the end, but the collapse of heliports, supply vessels, contractors, replacement parts industries, and experienced crews. As that “baseload” shrinks, unit costs spike and entire clusters can stop overnight when a hub or pipeline falls below minimum throughput. In the Gulf and in Appalachia, such hub cliffs are everywhere. In Alaska, the minimum flow requirement of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline is becoming a hard physical limit; what’s geologically possible strands economically or logistically.
3. Robotics and remote operations cut local OPEX, but they accelerate regional hollowing-out: fewer flights, fewer vessels, fewer on-site teams mean less work for the supply chain, longer lead times, and deeper dependence on a handful of OEMs. It works while everything works; when one link fails, outages are larger and recoveries slower. Meanwhile, financial discipline keeps the capex tap tight: with higher interest rates, volatile prices, and service-sector inflation, the majors prefer buybacks and dividends over risky growth.
4. “Only a price rally can save us,” is the reflex. But a sustained high price is macro-untenable without demand destruction. Expensive oil and gas act like a tax: they erode purchasing power and force recession risk. “Strong state guarantees” are no escape either in an environment of rising interest costs and swelling debt service. Rallies stay short and guarantees stay small—enough to consolidate, not to ignite an investment wave. That leaves the U.S. on a path to “managed decline” over the next ten to fifteen years: a noisy plateau to ~2028, then a gradual slide that accelerates in the early 2030s as hubs close and the decommissioning wave hits.
5. Rystad’s 14-year horizon—out to roughly 2040—looks more like an upper bound than a base case, and their assumptions are prudent: no fast-to-develop megafields, and “recoverable assets” revised downward every year. Add the negative variables—ecosystem erosion, hub cliffs, higher capital costs, tighter methane and leak standards—and the median horizon moves forward: more like the mid-2030s than 2040.
6. The social consequences are predictable and painful. As the Rust Belt and coal regions showed, jobs don’t disappear linearly but in chains. Regions like Corpus Christi—where crude exports, petrochemicals, and LNG are communicating vessels—feel the pullback first among suppliers, then in municipal finances, schools, and healthcare.
7. And the alternatives? Wind, solar, electrolysis, even nuclear all contribute, but they do not replace fossil fuels one-for-one, not quickly, and not at system costs that leave prosperity intact. The “laws of the house” are unforgiving: net energy, energy density, conversion losses, build tempo, and the fossil front-load determine the outcome—not the Excel model.
The sober conclusion: U.S. fossil production can run at a high level for another decade, but the inflection point is in sight. If we want to limit the damage, we shouldn’t count on miracles; we should manage the decline honestly—and start early to cushion the social fall.
I am interested in the spreadsheets. Gail can connect you with me if you desire. Nice work.
Dennis L.
be my guest. I did a detailed study of oil field depletion in the North Sea on the Dutch part. There are many similarities with what is happening now in the ‘Gulf of Mexico and, of course, differences.
the gulf of mexico is now the gulf of America—which delivers a whole new oil reserve, previously untapped…
problem solved
this is why nations that want to stay alive in the late fossil era have nationally owned energy industries. an interesting parallel is the current duel in ukraine between the profit oriented western military industry and the russian sector. who is outproducing whom?
I suppose buying a share of Intel is supposed to be parallel, also.
I would also like to see what your assumptions and data on which you base this are.
I looked at decline rates for past-peak shale formations and saw that they about halve over 10 years following the peak. So we may still get a decent amount out of the Permian in 10 years, but yes, it will be significantly less. Canadian tar sands will continue to produce, so it’s not all over yet.
“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/
Thanks, I’ve read that, but a refresher is good periodically.
I think that the current apparent strategy of cutting large consumer nations off of resources through political decisions can buy time for others at the top of the pecking order. I’m thinking of Europe, obviously, as the paramount example, buying precious time for USA and Eurasia.
I understand that the US has some very heavy oil deposits that could, in theory, be developed if the price were higher. They are not normally considered in “reserves,” since they cannot be extracted at the current oil price.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225774611_Heavy_Oil_and_Oil_Tar_Sands_in_North_America_An_Overview_Summary_of_Contributions/figures?lo=1
When I look at this exhibit, I see that there seem to be considerably more heavy oil deposits in California than just the Kern River area. In theory, these could be developed, if the high oil prices (now going toward subsidies for other things) were put toward production.
Thank you for your response, Gail, the “resources” you refer to are familiar to me.
Maps regularly surface suggesting that the United States still holds enormous oil reserves. California, in particular, appears on paper to be rich in heavy oil, with tens of billions of barrels underground. But on closer inspection, these “reserves” are more of a mirage than a reality.
The distinction is crucial: reserves are volumes that can be produced economically with current technology and at today’s prices. Resources are geological deposits that exist, but are often inaccessible. California holds large amounts of heavy oil—thick, sulfur-rich crude that can only be extracted through steam injection. The process is expensive, energy-intensive, and consumes vast quantities of water. The energy return is barely proportional to the investment.
Large oil companies are forced by shareholder logic to channel their capital into short-cycle projects with quick returns, immediately visible in quarterly reports.
It is often suggested that in the event of a crisis these heavy oil resources could still be tapped. But that too is an illusion. Such projects require years of preparation and billions in upfront investment at precisely the moment when capital is scarcest.
In times of prosperity, they are too expensive; in times of crisis, they are unattainable—even under an autocratic, centrally directed state. Russia and Venezuela are clear examples.
American heavy oil demonstrates how misleading it is to think in geological quantities. The question is not what lies underground, but what actually comes to the surface—and at what cost. Oil that exists patiently on spreadsheets, but never at the moment it is needed.
oil has a price.
but it has no commercial value until ir reaches the actual point of use.
this simple fact of oil-life seems to escape those involved in the oil industry…
If someone could figure out a magical way to get the oil out, it would solve some problems, but make others.
Thanks zip though it seems your conclusion that US fossil production can run at a high level for another decade is at odds with your detailing of the systems theory. But I guess it depends on what you mean by a high level.
Also, there is an honest — in the practical sense if not the ethical sense — management protocol for peak oil collapse. It’s the almost 6 year old Non-Public Degrowth Agenda that can only be seen by reading between the lines, which is as it should be; after all, we all had to read between the lines in order to ascertain the peak oil reality in the first place. Any management protocol must necessarily be covert because I’m sure you agree that a public one would only make things catastrophically worse for obvious reasons.
We’re having a real scorcher of a summer in Kyoto, and everyone, but especially us Europeans, has to take more than usual care not to get heatstroke or dehydrated. Noel Coward warned us about this 87 years ago.
B, the Honest Sorcerer, talks about how European countries are being squeezed by the US and its tariffs.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/has-energy-economics-become-outdated
B quotes Bessent as saying,
“Other countries, in essence, are providing us with a sovereign wealth fund.”
At the end he says,
I hadn’t thought about the pressure of resource scarcity building up again, even if this approach somewhat tempers the problem for US now–maybe. If inflation is a problem, then perhaps it is not working so well.
They can thank Thatcher for that
After the fall of Iron Curtain, Germany attempted to recover some of its lost land, namely the Kaliningrad region, better known as Konigsberg, and some slivers of land awarded to Poland by Stalin.
Thatcher and Mitterand balked. Nobody cared about Mitterand, but Thatcher balked and Russia and Poland kept these territories and now Europe is completely powerless.
Poland was born brain-dead since its second independence awarded by Woody Wilson, and its national airport is named after a Frenchman. It has become too large for its own good and it will probably fold if Russia gets serious enough to reclaim the “Constitutional Monarchy of Poland”, with the Czar as its king, 1815-1915.
Have there ever been any politicians you liked? Im not sure what I am hoping for in the answer.
Not since 1914.
What is the rationale behind your answer?
Beginning of World War I?
Sounds reasonable to me.
“All those who have previously worked, with more or less consciousness, on the supranational construction of human culture and now suddenly want to carry the war into the realm of the spirit are committing an injustice and a gross error of reasoning.
They have served humanity and believed in the existence of a supranational human idea for so long as no serious event contradicted this idea, as long as it was convenient and natural to think and act in this way.
Now, when it becomes work, a danger, a matter of life and death to cling to that greatest of all ideas, they are backing down and singing the tune their neighbors like to hear…”
(from Hermann Hesse, “O friends, not these tones!”, 1914, English via Google Translate)
Poland was conquered by Russia only when we were attacked simultaneously by Germany. Russia alone cannot conquer Poland, especially when there is NATO. And btw. this year Poland has reached GDP per capita (PPP) of Japan :> (the IMF data). Poland is a succes story of the last 3 decades. In that time only 2 countries in the world grew faster – South Korea, and China.
This doesn’t adequately account for the geopolitics-driven foreign investment into Poland that occurred because USA/NATO/EU wanted to influence Poland as a buffer against Russia.
As an aside / a tangential a factoid – Jeffrey Sachs who arranged for foreign funding to Poland and claims to have tried the same for Russia, discusses how the types of deals cut for Poland were denied to Russia (currency stabilization fund, debt payment freezes and restructuring) because the point was to harm Russia and prevent its reemergence.
Wikipedia has this to say:
It also says:
Recently, its energy consumption per capita has been falling. This is usually not a good sign.
Thanks for the link.
Dennis L.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVN_0OZng-o
California SCRAMBLES as Clock Running Out on Refineries Closing! (19:44)
2,813 views Premiered 2 hours ago
“California is facing a major fuel crisis as two of its biggest oil refineries prepare to shut down—Phillips 66 in Los Angeles and Valero in Benicia. Experts warn this could cut up to 21% of the state’s refining capacity, triggering gasoline shortages and driving prices as high as $8.43 per gallon by 2026.”
Perhaps California will finally catch on. California has particular refining requirements that are hard to meet, making imports more difficult. California hasn’t been sending the right signals to investors. The two companies leaving the state say that they are closing their refineries, not that they are seeking buyers. No one would want them.
Based on things not in the video, the fact that California is uphill across mountains, means that pipelines do not easily run there from Texas and other oil producing states. Imported oil and oil products must come by ship. California is not close to oil-producing areas of the US, except perhaps Alaska, by ship either. California needs Kern River (heavy) oil, plus whatever else it can get.
interesting—-that CA as the prime rebellious state against the Trump regime…..
is put on a path where fuel shortages are seeming likely in the near future.
First I had to get used to the new normal and now I have to get used to the new Norman.
Proud of you Norm!
I assure you that gasoline was close to 5 dollars a gallon there also in late 2024. Which is normal because the CA government is totally corrupt and does not do its job. In Michigan it costs half as much. It has nothing to do with the Trump mystique. You really are a modern Xhosa.
Explain to us what ” a modern Xhosa” means.
i wondered about that too
i hope its complimentary
The Xhosa believed, in a nutshell, that if they slaughtered all their cattle the drought would end. Of course it did not work, and now they were without cattle. To believe that things would improve if Trump were more polite to journos (which are incidentally a bunch of ghouls. at least US mainstream ones) is like believing that thing would have improved, if only the Ukrainian whores had provided better blow to Hunter Biden. They are in fact details and subplots that emerge spontaneously in declining civilizations. Resources drive ethics, in general.
a thought process/comment based on daft theories…
as i guessed….
why am i not surprised
Ponderings of nature and human destiny.
Just refilled my hummingbird feeder. The ruby throated hummingbirds here in northeastern North Carolina will be migrating south in a matter of a few days or weeks. They are tanking up at the feeder to pack on as much fuel reserve as possible. (1 part pure sucrose cane sugar and 3 parts filtered water changed every third day, with vinegar cleaning and thorough rinse. )
Even though the feeder has been well stocked all summer long and with only three resident hummingbirds, whenever there are two at the feeder, they immediately start attacking each other. Plenty of sugar water for all yet they fight, even when their mating and reproductive cycle has ended. Hummingbirds are very territorial.
It is quite stunning that even as they are trying to load up on calories for the migration, they still waste energy fighting each other off.
I conclude there is no hope for humanity. This behavior is so embedded into the animal kingdom genome, there will never be peace between humans.
All human races and tribes fight, and brutally. DEI is the biggest hoax/scam perpetrated on top of climate change, COVID vaxxes, the FED, moon landings, the need to “PROTECT OUR DEMOCRACY,” etc.
The Japanese war loads featured centuries of combat. Africans,
Chinese , Asian Indians (India vs Pakistan) and last but not least white Europeans from the Vikings to the Eastern and European ” civilizations.” Centuries of warfare.
Yet I have even seen footage of a hyena and a leopard eating on either end of a carcass- sharing it – if they were hungry enough and the cost of fighting off the other was too great.
While fossil fuels enabled world war on a mechanized scale like WWI, WWII, Gulf Wars I &2 etc, relative tranquility in the past century may have been enabled by plentiful resources and energy and less population density.
But all that is about to change in the coming decades. Fewer resources and larger population could make this conflict very gory.
Fighting certainly does certainly seem to be built into the way economies work, especially if there are not enough resources to go around.
////////relative tranquility in the past century may have been enabled by plentiful resources and energy and less population density.//////
You are quite correct, and have just described the ”American Dream”.
thats all it was—an energy surplus—roughly 1945–1970…
and gullible fools soak up the lies of the ponzi salesman, who promises:-
”you will all be so rich you won’t know how to spend your money”
and when the ponzi scheme collapse, it will be everyone else who carries the blame, not him. Which were pretty much the last words Hitler uttered before he shot himself.
If there is one human on this planet that ha his shit in order…it is no other THAN Norman Pagett!
Norman gets all his best pearls of wisdom out of the Winnie the Pooh stories.
He’s our resident Eyore:
“Everybody crowds round so in this forest. There’s no space. I never saw a more spreading lot of animals in my life and in all the wrong places.”
“Days. Weeks. Months. Who knows?”
“I never get my hopes up, so I never get let down.”
“When stuck in the river, it is best to dive and swim to the bank yourself before someone drops a large stone on your chest in an attempt to hoosh you there.”
“The sky has finally fallen. Always knew it would.”
“It’s the only cloud in the sky and it’s drizzling, right on me. Somehow, I’m not surprised.”
“End of the road. Nothing to do and no hope of things getting better.”
well keep it to yourself Steve,—or you’ll be labelled as a delusion buster….
‘moon landings’?
Laser reflectors magically appeared on the moon?
Time, date and mission number!
Otherwise B/S!
Well, if they can fake moon landings, they can certainly fake laser reflectors on the moon.
My own view is they might well have landed on the moon and come back in one piece six times, and they surely would have if they could have done so, but if they couldn’t have done so, then they would have done a wonderful job of faking the whole thing.
How can we, the audience, be sure either way?
LOL
That was an excellent response, Zen-like in its simplicity, and right up there with Norman rolling his eyes.
But I would have preferred an answer, a rebuttal, or a brief explanation of what was wrong with my thinking there.
Still, you don’t have to play if you don’t want to.
Some people still think they have a chance in the future, spreading delusions which get more outlandish every day.
I see this as a culmination of a 120 year binge, by two legged apes formerly known as ‘lower class’ who had a semblance of comfortable living, going back to their natural states after 120 years of wasting copious amount of resources for nothing.
I have posted quite a few videos about how people lived before 1914.
Fishermen at Bur Said, Anglo-Egypt, 1897
https://youtu.be/AP8SEk__mGs?si=D0XSljuWnhvI7FiY
Home Life of a family, presumably in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, 1897
https://youtu.be/lx7tFvFkPYY?si=xHyjltEPxrT-YPQ0
(Note than at least 12 people are dining in a small table. It was the norm)
Brooklyn, 1897
https://youtu.be/-PEt8OM7e_c?si=jLsUsq08FvAehnU_
It would suck to return to such stages but it is coming.
Belief on nonexistent fantasy contraptions to save their indulgent lifestyles will not work; a few people at the top might get lucky to transcend this world, but they are not going to be too generous for those not related to them.
Here are some scenes I witnessed in India when I visited areas near Mumbai, India in 2012:
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/men-repairing-road.jpg
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/auto-rickshaw.jpeg
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/woman-carrying-two-pots-of-water-on-her-head.jpg
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/women-washing-clothes.jpg
These are what a low energy lifestyle seems to look like. I am not sure how we make metal pots for carrying water any more, however, or how we make autos of any form, in the future. Electricity availability was less than 24 hours a day. Refrigerators didn’t make sense.
Gail, my favorite are the rat rosters that clear the fields for the farmers and their payment are put on the stubble to cook and crunch on…head first. As Fast Eddie to posted here along ago he can’t wait to witness those so called upper class elite smug offspring around the fire 🔥🐀fighting over the next one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuZP8FWS4JA&t=43s
The ‘Rat Eaters’ of Bihar: India’s poorest people
The video of Brooklyn shows well dressed people, children playing and moving briskly. The streets are clean. It looks like a wonderful place to live.
Do you see yourself as one of those having a chance? If so, what skills do you have which will make you one of the few?
Dennis L.
Video of the family in Budapest shows everyone very well dressed, with elaborate outfits on even the children. I didn’t see that in India.
I have lived long enough. Enough of the delusionists who will try to find any excuse to support their delusions.
one set of my grandparents never had indoor running water, sanitation or electric light. (though Grandad was fond of saying—electric light will never amount to anything)….
they were the last, before the ‘great improvement’….though they lived to see the lives of their children improve, cars, nice houses and so on…
but looked at another way, they were also last of a line that stretched back through infinite time, thousands of years, as ”normality”….
it is our ”modern” generations that are the freaks (of modernity)–provided by cheap surplus energy. when the cheap energy is gone, we will revert to the existence ive described.
Sounds like my granddaddy who died back in the 1970s in his 90s. He own a home with a coal furnace that heated the hot water provide steam heat and hot water. Very frugal and no waste. Resoled his shoes and mended his clothes. Everything was fixing, nothing replaced. Could not relate to modern way of life.
25 August, 2025 – 10:55 a.m.
“GAZA, DOUBLE ATTACK ON HOSPITAL: SECOND BOMB HITS RESCUERS ON LIVE TV.
Earlier today, an Israeli airstrike hit the Naser hospital complex in Khan Younis.
As rescue workers arrived, a second bombing targeted them on live TV.
4 JOURNALISTS AMONG THE VICTIMS
According to initial information broadcast, four journalists were among the victims of the attack.
Reuters photojournalist Hussam Al-Masri, Al Jazeera photojournalist Mohamed Salama, AP and Independent journalist and correspondent Mariam Abu Dhaqa, and journalist Muat Abu Taha, who worked for NBC.”
https://t.me/andreazhok/646
(post translated with Deepl.com)
Sad situation!
This is the western way of war. During the bombing of Serbia, they would often double-tap once the ambulances arrived. It’s been going on a long time but of course will never get coverage here.
Serbia deserved such treatment for 1914
Technical medical article on adverse events after Covid mRNA vaccination
25 July, 2025
“mRNA Technology Triggers a Chain Reaction of Biological Destruction.
Two landmark studies map the “Cascade of Harm”—from transcriptomic chaos to proteomic errors, systemic stress, and catastrophic clinical outcomes.”
https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/breaking-mrna-technology-triggers?r=14jb45&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/breaking-study-mrna-injections-induce
The first link highlights two studies, one of which has already been published, the other one is a pre-print.
The published study looks at how “multi-morbid” patients fare 210 days after having either a covid infection or mRNA immunization for covid. The conclusion says that those who had covid fared better in terms of long term outcomes, based on a longitudinal study. In the words of the conclusion,
The other link is an article that Peter Mc Cullough is one of the co-authors of. It is only a pre-print, rather than a peer-reviewed article. It is titled, “Synthetic mRNA Vaccines and Transcriptomic Dysregulation: Evidence from New-Onset Adverse Events and Cancers.”
In the Findings Section, it says:
IEA… Spinning Gold from Straw – Every Court Wants the Same Thing
From straw to gold – how the IEA keeps every palace satisfied
Once upon a time there was a guild of alchemists, based in Paris, that called itself the International Energy Agency.
Their task was simple and impossible at once: to gather straw – raw data, crooked statistics, uncertainties – and spin it into gold. Not the kind of gold you can store in a vault, but the shine of certainty. Ministers, markets, and media want the same thread every year: a story that reassures, that points the way, that offers the illusion of control. And so the alchemists turn their wheel. Year after year, they present scenarios.
First there was the Current Policies Scenario: a dry description of what is written in law. Later came the Stated Policies Scenario, dressed up to look more like what governments promised they would do. And for a while there was even a Net Zero Scenario, sketching out a fairy-tale path to climate goals. It all seemed real enough: straw became gold, uncertainty became order.
But behind the curtain, things stirred. The difference between “what is written” and “what is promised” is not about data, but about power. Every scenario is a political choice. And so resistance grew. Fossil fuel interests, especially in the United States, saw their future painted too dark.
Then the king entered the stage: Donald Trump, ruler of drill baby drill. He gazed at the IEA’s crystal ball. Too much green, not enough black gold. His courtiers warned that the United States would withdraw support from the Agency unless the old conjuring trick returned: the Current Policies Scenario.
Drill baby drill!: “Spin again, and make the gold shine brighter!” The alchemists bowed. Quietly, the change was announced: from this year onward, the CPS would return.
The IEA speaks to every patron, as long as the fee is paid. Green, grey, black… you ask, we spin. And so the circus goes on. Each autumn the World Energy Outlook appears as a gaudy performance: spreadsheets as jugglers, charts as fire-breathers, scenarios as trapeze artists.
Yet a dwarf lurks in the wings, Rumpelstiltskin 2.0. He whispers: depletion… EROEI… the true laws of nature. He knows that gold spun from straw never lasts. The gilt peels off, the thread unravels. And the energy courtiers know it first: Chevron and Total. They don’t believe in fairy tales. They turn to recapitalisation, buying back their own shares, keeping clear of risky projects that might one day spin out golden threads.
Meanwhile the straw moulders on the ground. That’s just physics.
Thanks zip!
I am afraid you are correct. The IEA has been pushing the nonsense that we can somehow transition away from fossil fuels. It is reported to be the organization that has sent amazingly high fossil fuel resource availability numbers to the climate modelers. But renewables aren’t performing as hoped.
EIA = Energy Inaccuracy Agency —- Mike Shellman
Rachel Reeves ‘heading towards IMF bailout’
Economists warn of ’70s-style debt crisis unless Chancellor changes course
https://archive.vn/vYImI#selection-2157.4-3216.11
I hadn’t realized that Britain had had an IMF bailout in 1976. It is not surprising.
Britain, and probably quite a few other areas, are headed in the same direction now. All of the debt being carried, with higher inflation leading to higher needed interest rates, is a major problem.
After UK will be France then other nations . Can IMF bailout the world ? 🤣🤣
Not likely. This is a list of IMF membership and voting percentages. Too many countries are doing badly.
https://www.imf.org/en/About/executive-board/members-quotas
Confirmed . I can post articles from FT , Telegraph etc but all are behind a paywall . Daily Mail is a rag but this is confirmed . Watch 8th September .
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15038207/France-faces-catastrophic-2-85TRILLION-debt-explosion-meltdown-minister-warns-country-heading-IMF-bailout-Emmanuel-Macrons-government-verge-collapse.html
The IMF is just another word for surpluses
if there are no surpluses, there can be no IMF…
Who will bailout the IMF ?🤣
Has anyone ever heard of multiple chemical sensitivity my sister is not well with this
Is your sister overweight?
“Now that trump has D.C. locked down and is getting set to send the military to cities. I’d like to point out that the 2nd amendment bros are nowhere to be found.
How many times? How many stupid arguments? Some chowderhead with his chest puffed out. “We need our guns in case the government gets tyrannical….shall not infringe… we the people… blah blah blah.”
Cowards. The biggest group of hypocrite cowards. Gun companies selling these middle aged men a rambo fantasy that one day they’ll have to save the country from a tyrannical government. They bought their camouflage outfits. All their gear, merchandise, 1776 stickers. They even got their own coffee line. Compensating for a small dick and shit personality. ”
https://x.com/smalls2672/status/1959608386951029037
Hitler didn’t start with camps.
He started with:
• “Make Germany great again”
• Banning books
• Targeting the press
• Blaming immigrants
• Creating enemies from neighbors
• Defunding the arts
• Stoking fear of outsiders
• Demonizing educators
• Rewriting history in schools
Sound familiar? Or should I type louder?
(not written by NP)
Hitler was faced with not enough energy for his people. Food supply was a major problem. I have seen photos of the many emaciated people. Germany was at peak hard coal. We are facing a similar problem on a world basis today, but with oil and coal. It should not be surprising that “solutions” are similar.
good points.
Capitalism too. It was the great depression that really sunk Germany after losing WW1. Not only Hitler was born, but Mussolini as well in Italy.
and of course it was Hitler who ended the great depression—he just didnt realise it at the time
He just started with resource depletion like everyone else. don’t add irrelevant details. you are making it sound that if trump stopped criticizing the press or blaming immigrants somehow things would change.
surely the people of the world think that if we are the type of people who sacrificed to some stupid god (in this particular case the gods of free expression and diversity). and indeed we are. sort of postmodern Xhosa.
free expression and diversity was bought with cheap surplus energy…
before that we had, effectively, serfdom.. (dress that up how you wish, but personal freedom, for the vast majority, did not exist…or existed in name only.)
free expression, like our ability to go where we please, when we please (and so on) is a very recent anomaly in the history of humanity…(we could move only at a walking pace)
I also said, in a previous copmment, that if Trump had not appeared, it would be a similar idiot., making similar fatuous promises. Such men have always punctuated our history. (check for yourself–its all there)..
Trump and Hitler are just waves on the same sea, as I’ve said before. History is just a fleeting separation of the same series of events. Because the human mind does not alter.
The end results will also be the same, plus or minus a few details.
Perhaps you should type out your proposed solutions to Weimar Germany’s problems and to humanity’s current pickle, Norman, rather than merely typing variations on the theme of “Everyone I hate is Hitler.”
By the way, Hitler was by no means the first leader to operate concentration camps, and by no means the last.
Little known factoid: The first country to operate de-facto concentration camps was the United States of America, which during the 19th century, employed a policy of forcibly relocating Native American tribes to limited areas known as reservations. The natives were used to camping, of course, but this was their first experience of being concentrated. Conditions on these reservations were often poor, resembling concentration camps in terms of their inadequate resources, harsh living conditions, and loss of autonomy.
Spain, in Cuba, under the leadership of Spanish General Valeriano Weyler, during the Cuban War of Independence (1896-1898). These camps were established as part of a strategy to control the Cuban population and suppress the rebellion against Spanish colonial rule and were known for their harsh conditions and high mortality rates.
In 1898, the U.S. launched the Spanish-American War, seized Cuba, and established concentration camps there that were similar to the Spanish camps. These camps were intended for refugees and also for anyone the Americans perceived as a potential threat.
Impressed by the Spanish innovation, the British also followed suit during the Second Boer War (1899-1902), establishing concentration camps in South Africa to intern Boer civilians. The conditions in these camps were poor, leading to significant mortality rates. The British camps were primarily overseen by Lord Kitchener, who is better known as a poster boy for British Army recruitment.
This is correct. The UK and also Italy operated concentration camps decades before Hitler. The UK also started WWI once it reached peak coal in 1913. I wish we could get away from these stupid childish western myths Norm keeps retelling.
You can put yourself in the shoes of a Chinese or Indian reading all this, they sure will start thinking of how easy it will be to crush the whites when the time comes.
myths?
I set out a list
feel free to delete any errors.
Over and over, the big issue seems to be, “not enough to go around.”
The outcome wasn’t that prices went up, and everyone was happy. The outcome was that governments responded with concentration-like camps for some citizens. This presumably left the remaining citizens with a little more goods and services.
dictators have no option but to expand outwards to support their delusions and promises….
this is why they usually get bumped off—because people realised theyve been duped
all this is history—-but the same thing keeps happening.
That’s interesting Tim.
I never thought about Indian reservations being concentration camps.
My great uncle was a fighter pilot during WW2 in Germany and was shot down and held in Nazi camp for over a year. He wrote a whole book about it when he got back. They made eat “grass soup” everyday. He always talked about it.
I remember that when the shut downs of 2020 began, one of the major reasons mentions for them (besides covid) was that there were too many protests for low wages and inadequate public services. Keeping everyone inside restored order, so it seemed like a valuable approach. In fact, Wuhan, where covid first seemed to spread, was having problems with protests, not long before that.
Ol reante’s already got a quad for chores but really got his finger on the pulse now he’s trying to get the flatbed truck switched out for a Tw200 or the greatest selling automobile of all-time in the Honda CT. The brothas ain’t no dummies and they’re collapsing first, too, with little bikes. And naturally the cracker ass new woke conservative spooks at ZH are hamming it up like they ain’t liking it too much cuz it’s ‘messing with their optics’ lol, cuz that’s how you troll the Right from the Right:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/dirt-bike-gangs-terrorize-streets-dc-baltimore
According to the link:
Things seem to be getting better, now.
Thx my comment was more about how ZH is shedding crocodile tears over black kids doing nothing more than driving into the city together on their quads and dirt bikes just because most of them aren’t street legal because of neolib/neocon monopolistic emissions and safety standards. Those crocodile tears arent true conservatism — libertarianism — it’s a new woke Handjob that drives MAGA into the same clownshow state of mind that it drove the libtards under Biden. And all the while the liberals are now becoming the more populist again, and the true populist core of MAGAMAHA have already peeled off.
On the front end of globalism, 30 years ago, it was the Left that comprised the vast majority of anti- globalist national populism. The WTO protests in Seattle were mostly gen X leftist. I was there for them. That’s what the Hand’s tapping into right now because timing is everything. These black kids on air-cooled engines are saying, we need these things to be street legal like in the third world because they get 50-150 mpg and it’s dirt cheap and super easy to maintain them. And they’re fun as shit. And MAGA wokesters wanna shut that down.
Rinse and repeat until the political triangulation is complete.
Sorry this is a bit out of topic. I have to comment on Cracker Barrel. When I look at the CEO i see Ashkenazi with earrings that say these are worth more than your house. She is doing her assigned job destroy a piece of white culture. Her bosses consider it a bonus if she bankrupts the company in the process. A small piece of fifth gen warfare.
This is a perfect example of the Hand’s new era of full-spectrum trolling and gaslighting that we’ve just entered. As the triangulation of national socialism draws ever closer, the space between the sides of the triangle narrows, and the gaslighting and trolling begins to fill the whole space because there is ever-less political distance between what used to be the two old duopolistic establishments.
Uncle Herschel, the mascot of Cracker Barrel commercial culture, is Ashkenazi kitsch in the first place… Herschel.
The political fallout of the makeover is both Left and Right not liking the makeover… together, while the makeover itself demotes the Ashkenazi mascot that nobody really realizes is Ashkenazi…while Israeli Zionism moves ever closer to meeting its Maker, and an unitarian anti-zionist national socialism is on the march. Welcome to the Consent Factory on a Sunday afternoon.
You got that over changing a company logo? Are you Alex Jones?
Step into the fray, Wit. Or don’t. But if you don’t, then don’t expect the hurly burly to make any sense whatsoever. Nothing comes for free. People like you thinking that I’m like Alex Jones just comes with the territory.
Michael Every, who’s been the best for years now — and who I’m convinced is a closet peak oiler, which is why he’s the best because it gives him a structural feel for what’s going on — just today publicly released a subscriber-only primer on USD stablecoins that he released privately on the 21st. In it he drops a differently worded version of my “digital greenback” bomb, and basically out of nowhere in the context of the article – so Michael didn’t disappoint! It begins with “Failing that” (meaning Collapse, which is a word he can never use):
“In theory, this implies the need for an ever-growing amount of T-Bills for the US to allow USD stablecoin-based trade to expand, just as with the current Eurodollar system – the ‘Triffin Dilemma’. Failing that, they could become akin to a deflationary gold standard (and/or trade access to the US is necessarily de facto limited).”
“deflationary gold standard.” That’s different wording for digital greenback public money (Treasury issued) that can survive a private money system deflationary collapse. And note how in the other best excerpt from his primer, he hints at the digital greenback’s mercantilist structural advantage over the financialized, failing FRN:
“However, the primary logic is that USD stablecoins would be designed mostly for use by US allies as we head towards greater global bifurcation. There, via online platforms, private sector uptake may be seen for all the reasons already listed – plus FX diversification. While this means exchange rate risk for the holder (which in many emerging markets is seen as mostly unidirectional, even if the dollar is well down vs EUR, JPY, CHF, etc. in 2025), the ability to anonymously hold de facto US dollar MMFs, and to cheaply and easily remit and transact in them, could quickly cement USD stablecoins in many places. That’s true even in developed markets.
Indeed, recent trade negotiations, which ringfenced the US with tariffs, also show America has the ability to force others to accept terms they do not like. This could soon include payment for exports to it only in stablecoins, not dollars, or at least a portion of them, which would spread their international usage further.
Moreover, the US could lean on Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar –the source of much of Europe’s LNG, for example – to insist on payment for their energy in USD stablecoins: that would mean everyone who buys energy – except those who buy from the likes of Russia or Iran, etc. – needing to hold them.
Hypothetically, over time trade finance/trade could even start to involve –or revolve round– the Treasury not the private sector and the banking system: in the extreme, T-Bills would be akin to US export quotas of a sort.
Such neo-mercantilist economic statecraft may sound inconceivable to those accustomed to US/global free trade, it fits comfortably with a White House already embracing tariffs, making Nvidia pay a 15% fee to sell its AI chips to China (potentially extending that model to other firms too), and maybe taking a direct stake in chipmaker Intel, as the Pentagon takes a 40% stake in a US rare earths firm.
Indeed, USD stablecoins could work alongside the existing Eurodollar system of offshore fiat dollars ($120trn by some estimates), which is already a source of US financial power.”
What he doesn’t mention, or can’t publicly connect if he is in fact a closet peak oiler, is that the primary purpose of the digital greenback stablecoins are to progressively replace the Eurodollar monetary offshoring of the US bond market that sees foreign banks using US bonds as collateral for fractional reserve lending, in Eurodollars. If industrial civilization is going to hold together for as long as possible during the reserve currency deflationary depression that sees almost all other currencies rapidly inflating against that rapid deflation, then US public finances MUST be propped up with unlimited demand or civilization collapses chaotically. So the the solution is to provide an epic backdoor bailout for the privatized dollar by publicizing it, and without publicizing it, if you follow me; stealth converting the FRN, progressively, into a digital greenback that will have global demand on both the white and black markets alike. A centralized greenback with decentralized access. A ‘paradoxical’ national socialist public currency for everyone on the planet with at least an intermittently functioning smartphone. Trump obviously doesn’t have the foggiest idea about any of this. How about you WIT?
https://www.zerohedge.com/crypto/stablecoins-unstable-system
I now realize that the changing of the cracker barrel logo is the downfall of industrial civilization. I was once blind, but now I see.
LOL!
That’s a strawman WIT. The bipartisan backlash against Cracker Barrel gentrifying its logo post- peak gentrification, and the resultant stock crash, reinforces to corporate America to de-gentrify, if anything. Neolib/neocon gentrified consumer culture must undergo a death by a thousand cuts and cracker barrel is just another cut, nothing more.
Hey, nevermind the revelations new digital greenback, huh? Nothing to see there. Just more lunatic ravings, because you’ve got your priorities straight.
Anyone who believes a digital currency can work cannot believe in Peak Oil.
Jeez WIT, what’s with the strawman arguments? It’s not WILL work. We’ve been living with digital currency since computers went online. So we will live with them until computers go offline. And no longer than that. Remember how I said all it takes is someone to have intermittent cell service to buy and sell stablecoins?
There’s no greater complexity in a digital public currency. It’s just another app and some more servers, or the reallocation of existing servers, and another bureaucracy. No big deal.
I understand that digital currency is a thing as of today. No one can understand Peak Oil and believe that anything Internet related can really be relied upon in the long run. Also, if your cell service is intermittent then your ability to buy or sell stablecoins is intermittent making it impractical to use as money.
WIT your srawmen just keep on marching. I never said digital greenbacks were a long term solution. If you ever paid any attention to my body of work here, you would know that. The greenbacks are for duct taping the world together for two or three years — maybe five — while the nuclear power industry is decommissioned.
Intermittent banking is more practical than no banking at all wouldn’t you say? But there will also be debit cards for the greenbacks so redundancies will exist.
I’d appreciate it if you acknowledged the rationale.
This is another reante moment that is outside of almost everyone else’s Overton window. The Overton window is nested.
I wish you would work on being polite to other commenters. They cannot be expected to have put together whatever you think you have said, over months and years.
Gail I’m only ever impolite in reply to a prior disrespectfulness, whether that disrespect is aimed at me or at someone else who doesn’t deserve disrespect. When WIT ridicules me with blatant logical fallacy, and linens me to Alex Jones, and you laugh at my expense – that causes my tone to change. Because I’m only human and I’m an alpha, and that’s physics.
When I got on the commenter Somebody for intolerantly disrespecting everybody who doesn’t toe the line on the Allied WW2 propaganda, you chose not to see that the causal disrespect justified calling-out, and decided not to publish my justifiable reaction.
Notice that I never disrespect people or are rude to them without cause. And if I were to be then please call me out on it.
No need to publish this one.
Thanks.
I am sorry. Your view that someone is impolite to you, is no cause for you to be impolite back. Learn to live and let live. Be polite to everyone.
reante
Nobody designates themselves as ‘alpha’—nobody…trust me
that is reserved for someone else to say—about you.–saying youre alpha puts you at the opposite end of the lifescale.
looks like its too late for you learn that lesson….but it is absolutely fundamental.
I apologize for calling you Alex Jones. Don’t take the comment section to seriously.
Mussolini called the joint working of government and business fascism.
Dude, it is just a logo. Also, the Jews are NOT behind everything that happens in the world.
But the Ashkenazi are behind everything and are also NOT Jewish. They come from the area of planet earth near/in Ukraine a thousand years ago. Never been to Palestine, never been to Jerusalem, sure are not Torah followers.
The time to feed the ‘working class’ well has passed
.
Las Vegas buffets are also gentrified. Those who cannot pay need not apply
I see the WSJ headline now:
Cracker Barrel Says It’s Going Back to Its Old Logo After Backlash
I asked ChatGPT this rather facetious question:
How long do you think it will take AI to figure out the whole of the universe and its workings and then store all the knowledge associated with that? And after that has happened, how long will it take humanity to ask all the questions that exhaust AI’s knowledge?
It replied:
1. “AI figuring out the whole of the universe”
That assumes two things:
That the universe is fully knowable in principle.
That AI will be powerful enough to derive and store all that knowledge.
Right now, physics itself isn’t “complete.” We don’t have a unified theory of quantum mechanics and general relativity, we don’t know what dark matter/energy are, and we don’t know if some things are unknowable in principle (Gödel’s incompleteness, Heisenberg uncertainty, chaotic systems, limits of computability). Even if AI surpasses humans, it might hit the same fundamental barriers — unless those barriers are just due to human limits, not nature’s.
If it is possible to fully describe the universe, AI’s timeline depends on:
Hardware progress (supercomputing, quantum computing, neuromorphic chips).
Data access (are there experiments/observations to feed it?).
Algorithmic breakthroughs (like going from Newton → Einstein in one leap).
That could be hundreds of years… or maybe AI could make leaps in decades if there’s a “missing puzzle piece” humans are blind to.
2. “Storing all the knowledge”
Even if AI discovers all laws, storing every detail of the universe (like the state of every particle) is impossible — the storage medium is inside the universe and can’t hold a perfect map of itself (like Borges’ “map the size of the territory” paradox).
So the best we’d get is a compressed representation (laws + initial conditions + approximations). That’s what physics already is, just incomplete.
3. “How long for humans to exhaust AI’s knowledge?”
This is interesting because humans might never exhaust it:
AI could generate new knowledge faster than we ask.
Many answers might be beyond human comprehension — so even if AI has the answers, humans may not be able to process them.
If AI’s knowledge is finite but enormous, humanity might spend millennia exploring it, like how we still haven’t exhausted Aristotle or Newton.
It’s also possible that the bottleneck shifts from AI → humans: AI knows, but we don’t even know what questions to ask.
My take (ChatGPT’s take)
AI will probably never have “complete” knowledge of the universe in the literal sense.
But it may get close enough that for all practical purposes, it feels like it knows “everything.” That could happen within a few centuries.
Humanity asking all possible questions? That might never end — because new questions often arise after an answer. Knowledge expands the frontier instead of closing it.
===============
ChatGPT asked:
“Do you want me to answer this in a more philosophical/metaphysical way (like whether “the universe can ever be fully known”), or in a more practical/technological sense (like AI research timelines, physics frontiers, compute scaling)?”
I said yes, and here is its answer:
1. How long for AI to “figure out the universe”?
Physics frontier today:
We’re stuck on major unknowns — unifying quantum mechanics & relativity, dark matter/energy, the origin of time, etc. These aren’t “small tweaks,” they’re paradigm-shifting gaps.
AI’s trajectory:
Right now, AI excels at pattern-finding in existing data but struggles with abstract theory invention. It hasn’t yet made a “new Einstein-level breakthrough.”
If AI research combines symbolic reasoning (math + physics models) with machine learning, we could see AI-assisted theoretical physics accelerate massively.
Add quantum computing or future specialized hardware, and AI could simulate things humans never could.
Timeline guess (very speculative):
Near term (10–30 years): AI accelerates physics research but doesn’t “solve it all.” Think of it like a super collaborator.
Medium term (50–150 years): AI may derive a unified physical theory if one exists. That’s our best shot at “figuring out” the deepest laws.
Long term (200+ years): AI may push beyond theory → simulation of whole universes, but still limited by chaos, quantum uncertainty, and computability.
So: centuries, not decades — unless there’s a “Manhattan Project for physics + AI” and we’re underestimating how fast breakthroughs compound.
2. How long to “store all the knowledge”?
Limits: You can’t literally store the entire state of the universe — storage is part of the universe.
What’s possible: Storing the laws + compressed models + datasets.
Example: DNA encodes life with ~3 billion base pairs (~1GB). The rules can be vastly smaller than the raw reality they generate.
Future storage tech: Advances like DNA storage, quantum storage, and ultra-dense nanomaterials might let us keep all human + AI-generated knowledge in a planetary-scale archive. That could realistically happen in 50–200 years.
3. How long for humans to “exhaust AI’s knowledge”?
Knowledge is generative: Every answer creates new questions (like how quantum mechanics opened whole new fields).
Human bottleneck: Even if AI hands us near-infinite knowledge, humans can’t absorb it all. It’s like handing someone the internet in 1500 — they wouldn’t know where to start.
Practical exhaustion: Humans may never catch up. Instead, knowledge will stratify:
AI-only knowledge (too complex for us).
AI-translated knowledge (digestible summaries).
Human-level science (what we can still do ourselves).
So realistically:
Humans won’t exhaust AI’s knowledge ever, unless we merge with it (brain–computer interfaces, cognitive enhancement).
Otherwise, AI’s “knowledge frontier” will always outpace human questioning.
✅ Practical takeaway:
AI could meaningfully “crack” the deepest physics laws in the next 1–2 centuries.
Storing that knowledge is solvable with advanced compression + storage tech within a similar timescale.
Humans will likely never exhaust AI’s knowledge, unless we fundamentally enhance ourselves — otherwise, we’ll just be swimming in an ocean that keeps expanding faster than we can paddle.
and yet I do not feel enlightened
If I want to read AI slop, I can interact with a chatbot myself.
HAHAAAA ^^
short yet concise sir 🙂
And if you DON’T want to read AI slop, ivanislav, then just don’t read it, is my succinct response. Simple! But you never thought of that, did you? 😉 Maybe you could interact with a chatbot for help on this matter. 🙂
I think posting pages upon pages of autogenerated crap is rude and that’s what I was getting at.
“posting pages upon pages of autogenerated crap”
A gross exaggeration – I didn’t post anywhere near even a single page. And AI is part of the modern world now. Getting it to ruminate upon itself was in part a philosophical exercise. It wasn’t rude and was not against netiquette in any way. You are not the arbiter here of what is rude. Our host would have deleted it, if it was rude. By all means criticise the gist of my comments, but not the fact that I post them – that is rude and an attempt at censorship.
“By all means criticise the gist of my comments”
I think the criticism was the fact that it wasn’t your comment, it was corporate slop.
Guessing to a degree there, as I never knowingly read corporate slop, so for those that post it, please follow the example of Dennis & demi and give fair warning at the top of the post. Thank you in advance.
Anyway, if you want corporate slop, just read the guardian.
“AI is part of the modern world now.”
Like a lathe?
A really useless lathe?
A really useless lathe that’s never turned a profit?
A really useless lathe that’s never turned a profit, which also drives those that interact with it too regularly into mental health issues?
Did you see the reaction of the users when they updated from 4 to 5?
There was a bizarre mix of family bereavement and junkie pleading.
That’s not healthy, but it is mental.
It’s a corporate tool, useful for corporate tools. Apart from that it’s a very dangerous weapon and will have people believing all kinds of weird rubbish. The kind of people that believe this 👇
https://youtu.be/E_cyCuCKQhs?si=0lB1xLf245JpTz7F
Before you laugh(admittedly I’d worry if you watch the whole thing) look into who is funding and promoting this gibberish and how it’s part of a whole larger game(yes, game. No reality allowed in the new order), which is changing people in very obvious ways, at an astonishing pace.
You can talk to your new gods and your new gods talk back.
How many more steps before your new gods dictate every aspect of your life, so ask who’s really behind your new gods(unprofitable) and so dictating(profitable).
I sees ya; where are ya?, said the elderly lady as we ran from her front door after knocking, playing a prank…yep, we are experts at that…what happened to Adam and Eve after they bit the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.?
That didn’t end well, did it?
nope
but i was good while it lasted…
and if shariah law catches up with me now—i am beyond caring, well—almost.
Wow Norm now you’re only half joking aren’t you? You’re rabbit hole must be straight down.
i never jest about such things
Because you’re a ladies man, I get it. You’re really gonna have to keep it on the DL now over there, we don’t want to lose you. You might even have to vote Farage after all these years. Fight fire with fire
continuing the joke
i didn’t say that…i said i didnt jest about such things….which i don’t…nothing more.
Farage is just trump-lite—a wannabe….not worth an eyeroll, but we have our share of gullible fools who believe him…
Actually Farage is a bonafide national socialist like Gabbard, and future PM of course. Both are left conservative true populists. Trump is a national fascist fake conservative fake populist. Look at the old UKIP platform and you will find yourself in agreement with a great deal of Farage’s economic policy. Very progressive housing policy, etc, not too far from that in the NSDAP party platform.
lol
utter bs
How long is it before AI runs out of electricity to power it?
Not too long
Haven’t they already had to drop plans because of energy supply, including the dreams of building their own power stations?
I’ve also read that Ireland’s next election could be decided on the subject, as data centres are now burning through more than the population, whilst demanding ever more energy.
AI does appear to be getting to grips with causing mental health issues, so maybe it will fulfil its intended purpose and everyone that uses it will soon top themselves, which coincidentally fits in perfectly with Degal’s explanation, when challenged to explain just how populations the world over were going to reduce so drastically. What a dull finale that would be.
The step from fossil fuel to fossil water is smaller than we admit
What strikes me, Gail, in your analyses of the limits of oil and gas production on Our Finite World, is that you rarely highlight the upstream role of water. That seems like an important blind spot – not only for you, but also for many of your readers. We often speak in barrels of oil, dollars per barrel, or EROEI, but rarely in cubic meters of water. And yet, water is the silent partner of the entire fossil chain. In shale plays, a single horizontal well often requires 10 to 20 million liters of water for fracturing. This in regions already struggling with drought, such as the Permian or Eagle Ford. On top of that, every barrel of oil brings up on average five barrels of “produced water”: highly contaminated brine that must be reinjected or disposed of. The consequences are not minor: earthquakes in Oklahoma and Texas, rising costs for handling, and growing local resistance. In the Middle East the story is similar, though in a different form. Saudi Arabia, for instance, has relied heavily on deep fossil aquifers — ancient reserves of water that will never recharge on human timescales. These aquifers have already been overdrawn for agriculture; using them to sustain energy projects only accelerates their depletion. Seen through this lens, the break-even is no longer just in dollars, but in a “break-even water balance.” Oil may still look profitable on paper, but hydrologically it is already unaffordable. So the step from fossil fuel to fossil water is like talking to your neighbour nextdoor. Both were laid down over millennia; both are being drained in a matter of decades. With oil we know the EROEI curve: ever more energy to extract ever less usable energy. With water, the same curve emerges: deeper drilling, saltier and more contaminated flows, more energy required to make it usable. It is two sides of the same denial. First we lived as if oil were infinite; now we live as if aquifers are eternal. But both are finite batteries, and both are draining faster than we want to believe.
I commented on the water and oil production issue earlier in the ME and the water crisis in Texas , However I agree it is still flying below the radar .
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2025/08/19/why-oil-prices-dont-rise-to-consistently-high-levels/comment-page-2/#comment-489465
To maintain our modern industrial technological civilisation we need materials – in huge quantities. This requires a huge assault on Mother Earth, with the contingent degradation of the environment. It is this environmental damage that is partly responsible for taking civilisations down, as all the Malthusian writers and analysts have told us long since. For us, it’s just all coming far sooner than most of us imagined.
The universe is infinite, we are at the beginning, not the end.
Dennis L.
Perhaps you meant, we are at the beginning of the end and the end starts a new beginning?
There are no new beginning , just a beginning for a new season of false hopes.
You’re making that up, Dennis, and not in a good way. The concept of infinity is an abstraction and nothing more. It’s only religious thinking that idolizes it.
Said in jest and paraphrasing the dad meme. “My God can beat up your god.”
Dennis L.
My creator you mean 🙂
It doesn’t matter how big the universe is, we human animals are stuck on this rock. Human animals cannot survive without our habitat, just like all other lifeforms.
In the near term I agree, in a long enough time we are all dead; but in the long enough term we really don’t know.
It is not that long ago that the big bang theory was the way to go, now there are pesky universes peeking out from further than the edge of our “universe.”
So another paraphrase, “God moves in mysterious ways. ” Seem he has a few surprises up in His universe.
I can’t prove mine, but if you are wrong, well the Greeks felt some times the gods were angry. I am a small business guy, if it works out that way I will sell the tickets; if it doesn’t, it won’t matter. That is my favorite bet, no way to lose, possibility of winning.
Dennis L.
God might have surprises but lije the stories of O. Henry tgey tend to be bad.
Perhaps you are referring to the fact that many/most/all parts of the universe seem to behave in cycle. When something seems to be the end, it is likely that a new substitute will be formed that is better adapted to the changing situation. An individual human is not reincarnated on this Earth, but new babies are born every year. If an economy fails, there will be new economies arising.
The universe might be infinite but accessible universe is known to be finite, and humans are neither the beginning nor the end.
zip if oil was hydrologically unaffordable then there wouldn’t be any oil would there? Perhaps you make that mistake because you’re pressed to make a point; we’re all well aware of the ever increasing need to pressurize fields, both conventional and unconventional alike, and speak on it intermittently, Gail included. I’m still looking forward to your first reply to someone.
I agree that water is another part of our problem.
Industrialization takes water. Industrialization for a large population takes an even larger amount of water. A big part of today’s water problem is too high population.
By the way, the water issue is yet another reason why I don’t consider EROEI to be a very useful metric. A major issue is that It assumes that you can make energy with the same kind of energy you are producing. A second issue is that it says nothing about water usage in the process.
A third issue with EROEI is that there is a huge delay between the time an energy-producing device is built and installed, and the time that the energy to payback the investment is actually produced. This creates a huge debt problem that needs to be funded, along with the interest. Both need to be paid to a financing organization. This is a huge source of outgo to the system.
This list of my EROEI complaints is not exhaustive.
I distinctly remember gas being ~$1.25 /gallon in the SF Bay Area around the time the Iraq war started, 2003-ish. Less than 3 years from peak conventional oil.
Five years later, gas spiked to nearly $5 /gallon.
That’s what happens in a peak oil scenario. Oil is cheap – right up until the very last second. Then it REALLY isn’t.
The spike in prices didn’t occur during the plateau or the peak. It happened “after*. I fully expect peak unconventional oil to work the same way.
The price spike will come, in time. Probably before this decade is out. But only after we crest the plateau.
You know what DID come before the peak though? Extreme energy costs. Remember the energy crisis in the 2000s?
Look at what’s happening now. Lots of parallels. I’d argue we are currently in a second energy crisis.
Which means that peak oil is close. And the spike in oil prices is not much further behind.
We (as in, Western society) are going to be in big trouble before this decade is out.
Welcome atr . I have been musing the same thought but was inconclusive . Your comment just pushed me over the line . Please keep commenting –new angles and perspectives are welcome .
I detailed the 2 Year Rule of peak oil numerous times at this site.
I searched for it, but I didn’t find what you said. Perhaps you referred to it slightly differently–used a hyphen perhaps, or somehow slight changed the name. Could you explain it again?
Thanks Gail.
The 2 Year Rule of Peak Oil
1970 was peak US conventional oil. About 2 years later was the energy crisis, the military surrounding of the ME, and the birth of the petrodollar.
1989 was peak Soviet production and about 2 years later the USSR collapsed.
1999 was peak cheap oil when adjusted for inflation and about 2 years later was the 9/11 Handjob and the beginning of the 21st century oil wars.
2005 was global peak conventional and about 2 years later was the Bear Stearns collapse and beginning of the GFC.
2018 was global peak total oil liquids and about 1.5 years later the Hand frontran civilizational collapse with the plandemic in order to artificially destroy about 30pc of demand for a year and a half in order to buy about 5 more years.
I have a different take. The work most people do is non-essential. As oil gets harder to take out of the ground, the fraction of the economy dedicated to extraction grows. People dedicate more and more of their purchasing power to essentials, people who produce non-essentials are increasingly out of work and become poorer, overall economic activity declines.
Whether oil goes up or down in nominal terms doesn’t matter all that much and either could happen. That is more a monetary decision and whichever way it goes, more people are out of work and only those connected to purchasing power (whether earned by producing essentials or illegitimately derived via nearness to monetary system spigots) will be able to afford it.
Discretionary spending is going down, corollary, Mc Donalds is finding it a hard market and wandering through shopping malls with discretionary income is now past or passing.
Dennis L.
” The work most people do is non-essential. ”
The problem is that our economic system is based on the concept of ” the landfill economy ” where ” Your waste is my income ” .
the ”work” we do pays the wages of everyone else—in an infinite circle of nothingness….
Whether or not work is “essential” is irrelevant in a capitalist system. What matters is demand for the work.
If there’s enough demand, the wages goes up, and people will do it. As more people do it, then wages go down as the number of people doing the work reaches equilibrium with the demand.
Which is why employers (and the govt) are so keen on increasing the supply of workers – to keep wages down.
You can apply the same rule to oil.
When oil is plentiful, things are cheap. When oil comes in short supply, things become more expensive.
But a shortage of oil also reduces demand in the capitalist market. Which means fewer people buying things. Which causes deflation.
This sets a hard limit on how much of the economy can be dedicated to extraction. Once enough deflation sets in, extraction peaks, because nobody can get a loan to actually do it.
So something weird happens. Prices go up even though there’s deflation. They go up because the price of oil is more influential than demand.
We all experienced this in 2008 – 2013. The dollar gained a ton of value through deflation caused by cratering demand. So in theory, prices should have gone down.
But they didn’t. Gas was almost $5 /gallon. Rent doubled or even tripled. Etc etc
I don’t remember people allocating more of their money to essentials though. The reason is simple – this isn’t SE Asia. America and it’s market have no concept of “essentials”. The culture and politics of the US simply won’t allow for it.
I remember Bush sending everyone a check so they can keep spending.
I remember people buying big expensive SUVs despite how expensive gas got.
I remember the adamant collective refusal of Americans to tighten their belts, borrowing more and more money to the point of starving and losing their houses.
All in the name of consumerism.
Most Americans will never switch to a mindset of minimizing their costs. They will keep spending, even if they have nothing left.
So Americans won’t spend more on essentials. Not until they’re absolutely forced to at the breaking point.
The economy will plateau and stagnate while energy costs take up more and more of it. Once the economy begins to shrink due to a lack of oil, energy costs will continue to rise relative to the economy. Once a certain EROI ratio is hit – maybe 1:4, maybe 1:3 – Americans will be squeezed out of affording consumables AND essentials.
The charts over on surplus energy economics are a pretty handy way to visualize this in action – https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/
That is when real change will occur – backwards, likely towards a more agrarian economy.
sounds about right atr
I said more will be spent on essentials (eg. food, shelter, medical, work-related transportation) as a percentage of overall spending. Discretionary (everything else) will decline. Your wall of text argument that essentials won’t take a greater share conflicts with already visible economic data over the last 10 years.
BTW this is a global argument. Some places will do better than others, there will be local exceptions.
One of the things Tim Morgan says, in the post you link to at his site is
We don’t know how robust the system really is.
One point you made is good. (Others too, but I wanted to single this one out):
“But a shortage of oil also reduces demand in the capitalist market.”
A self-organizing system seems to pull back, when there isn’t enough oil. It sends covid with and all of its restrictions. It leads to people working from home more. It sends a change in the type of clothing that people wear to work. Wage disparity grows. With a smaller middle class, people are inclined to dress more informally.
Could you please define essential?
Dennis L.
The one thing I would point out is that The Powers That Be have learned, “We don’t really wan’t spiking oil prices. They send inflation rates through the roof, and make citizens very unhappy.”
All of the most recent interest rate discussions have been about getting interest rates down again. The reason is presumably to push up affordability of new homes and new industrial buildings. This would raise oil demand and oil prices. I am not sure that the economy could stand that pressure. The high oil prices would reignite inflation. The economy is already under pressure from tariffs, as well.
I’m old enough to remember when they gave you free gifts to buy their petrol
I remember that cute little glasses were once handed out. I think they were shot glasses, but since my parents didn’t drink alcohol, they figured out other names for them. One was referred to as the “birdie glass,” because there was a yellow bird on it.
I don’t think the PTB have that much control or knowledge. I used to think so but then I met a few people in the FED and they are either really good actors or very stupid. I am starting to think that this train has left the station and there is no Engineers! We are going to see high prices momentarily and then I don’t know what comes next. But I think you are naive if you don’t think AI will have enough energy. It will have more than enough
[ivanislav says:
August 23, 2025 at 2:41 pm
we only need to buy time (perhaps a few decades) for greater intelligence to think up alternative systems. the existing system will disappear and so will most of us, which i guess is fine. the most important thing to me is that some system is able to persist that gradually reduces the horror of existence, in which every creature either devours or is devoured by another creature. that’s only normal because it’s all we’ve known.]
It sounds like you’re going through some kind of mental crisis, Ivanislav. I am praying that God shows you a way out of it. A.I. will not do a better job of coming up with systems than we can because it is not really intelligent. Any system will require resources that cannot be substituted and are probably not renewable.
The horrors of existence on Earth are due to the fact that resources on Earth are limited. If there are two plants competing for sunlight in a 1foot by 1 foot area, one of them is not going to decide uproot itself and travel thousand of miles to where there’s no competition for sunlight.
Yeah, it’s a little meta, but don’t you ever wonder what comes after us humans? I hope that as life continues to evolve, it will find a way that doesn’t involve eating other creatures alive, as happens in the animal kingdom and I’m guilty as well, cooking some chicken right now.
I’d also like for something to continue the evolution of intelligence and understanding and enjoy a good existence, for all that humans have endured to not go to waste, and it seems that would require IC to continue for a while longer, at least somewhere on the globe.
This is stepping into Susan Blackmore’s territory. The Meme Machine (1999) talks about how the next iteration always replaces the previous one.
What is intelligence? Im not buying into this AI isn’t ever going to be capable retort. It could be that the is in its infancy, and the tricks to being creative have not been introduced yet.
AI and quantum processing together might give artificial creativity a bump up. Will check back again a year once it bakes a bit longer.
In the mean time….. how about this? Its really holding up now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EW_snd8hb2Y
This is AI generated… video and music, though the creator says that he edits the music too. I asked him if he felt the tech was ready to produce coherent episodes… or even a full movie. He said that he believes it is possible… and is hoping to have something later this year. This reel seems like he is getting closer.
You’re free to not buy into it but the fact is that AI cannot create. Create means do something QUALITATIVELY new that hasn’t been done before, not just another human snowflake, or another teevee show, or another scan of available data that gets fed through a human-coded algorithm. AI is a parlor trick. An illusion. Was reading dem’s chatgpt post a pleasure? Yes, in an unsettling way. But all it is is a regurgitation, on steroids, of existing human thought — and worst of all it’s a regurgitation with an institutional bias, which only has a repressive effect on true creativity. And that’s just the beginning of the ways in which it can become a manipulated, dark simulation of true intelligence.
“AI is a parlor trick.”
You are not wrong….
But, what I am saying is … it doesn’t matter really.
AI needs just a couple more tricks, and it will be indistinguishable from human creatively. Let me explain.
Have you heard the quip that Humans are the Sexual Reproductive system for AI? It’s a bit of humour, but it is also….. true. Computers need to be made, and then powered etc.
In the same way, people are now interacting with AI with their innovative ideas. This is the spark.
AI is one thing only… an excellent context engine. That works incredibly well with language, which convinces people think it is a thinking being. Now, if the context of innovation can be determined, well, that kind of takes care of the creativity problem. In other words, AI and Humanity might unwittingly be bonding, and it doesn’t matter if it is creative of not, because humans do that bit anyway.
It doesn’t mean any of us will be any happier of course.
Thanks JK, I recognize that AI is a powerful tool for think-tanking. Ultimately it sounds like you’re saying that AI is still reliant on humans in order to generate truly creative content, and I agree with that
Unfortunately we have two choices a smaller population with a technological future or our current population fighting for the resources, it looks like we have made the final choice unless the elders intervene and substantially reduce
fighting over resources will have one guarantted outcome.
our resource base will be destroyed…
There you go again, “Always with the negative waves, Moriarty. Always with the negative waves.”
Dennis L.
CRAP!
lol
i agree dennis.
i f was alone in my thinking i would go along with that…
but better minds than mine (or yours) have the same negative thoughts.
I strongly suggest that you catch up on the current podcast of B—The Honest sorcerer.
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#inbox/FMfcgzQcpTGgQQMmpGxRHdmmVNsLNzMP
Dont take my word for any of it….keep your delusion about infinite progress—that is your privilege.
But some years ago I forecast that the USA would be under martial law in the future. Troops are being put on your streets right now, Under the fatuous excuse of restoring law and order)…..doesn’t that concern you?
But like i said—delusion is a self inflicted problem.
Norm we’ve all expected for a very long time that the US and all other able countries, besides, would presumably be under martial law as necessary due to peak oil. Perhaps you should consider that martial law isn’t actually necessary in the US at this exact juncture, and then ask yourself why it is supposedly being implemented if it isn’t necessary. Myself, I don’t see any remotely resembling martial law. The de facto martial law under the guise of a non-existent ‘virus’ was orders of magnitude more draconian than anything going on right now.
Norm, since you are not living in the US and are not affected directly by the breakdown of law and order in some parts of that country, the exercise of restoring law and order may seem fatuous to you. But for people who have been brutalized or seen their friends or relatives brutalized, injured, killed, or deprived of their property, restoring law and order may seem apt, proper, welcome, and long overdue.
I suspect you only think it’s fatuous because Trump is doing it. Which would make your attitude just another symptom of your tedious TDS.
One cure, of course, would be to stroll down a street in Chicago, Baltimore, San Francisco, or Detroit, and walk straight into a sucker punch from someone who thinks its fun to punch out random strangers on the street.
But short of you actually being mugged by reality, I don’t expect anything you see or hear or read will have any impact on your opinion.
Like this.
Or like this, a lady your age, who wasn’t expecting a punch in the face.
NP was voted Shropshire’s top happy-slapper in 2005. He proudly displayed the trophy on top of the harpsichord that he’d made himself in woodwork classes when he was a boy.
Tim fwiw I take the middle ground between you and Norm. Like half-urge implies, with the erstwhile British happy-slapping phenomenon, downtrodden urban youngsters have been doing this kind of stuff during recessions for decades. It just comes with the global fascist territory: cause and effect. I remember when I was growing up in NYC in the late 90s, black girls were going around for a little while sticking white ladies with safety pins I think it was. No armed National Guard deployments are necessary for that or even helpful, because they can’t be everywhere all the time. It should be pretty clear, even, and imo, that armed deployments at this terminal juncture are ultimately going to be counterproductive to law and order. Norm is just falling for a martial law misdirection play but that doesn’t mean that imo the Hand isn’t provoking a reaction with the misdirection play because all herding is the provoking of a reaction. Trump’s the fall guy on so many levels because there are so many levels to the global fascist security state. The national socialism will also be militantly law and order as necessary but it will also be radically addressing the fascist root socioeconomic causes driving the actings-out of the young and downtrodden.
Early 90s
Reante, a lot of my “opposition” to Norman is rooted in pointing out the absurdity of SOME of his positions AND on his knee-jerk adherence to certain MSM narratives and Democrat talking point. I know that at the age of almost 90, he can be excused for being a bit inflexible in his attitudes, but to pander to him would be the worst kind of deception. I feel I have to do my bit to try to keep what remains of his wits as sharp as possible.
There are some very deep divisions in political opinions these days, but I am committed to highlighting the importance of critical thinking and open dialogue. I believe in engaging with diverse perspectives, including the ones Norman presents—such as “Trump is Hitler with orange hair and minus the mustache”—can help foster a more comprehensive understanding of the issues at hand. Quite an optimist I am!
I never heard of the black girls with safety pins attacking white ladies. The chatbots have nothing to say about that apart from warning me to “exercise care to avoid spreading misinformation or perpetuating stereotypes.”
The bot did agree that the knockout game was a real phenomenon, but stressed it was not as widespread as all that, and it was not organized but just individuals doing their thing, and that to point out that almost all of the people doing that shit had black or brown skin was racist.
I live in Japan, where I am pretty sure there are zero incidents of people getting sucker-punched, the murder rate is 0.25 per 100,000, there are an average of 2 homicides involving guns per year in the entire country, and the police spend more time giving out tickets for speeding and looking for demented seniors who have walked out of the nursing home without permission than on investigating serious crimes.
According to my chatbot pal, based on data from the Japanese National Police Agency, the chances of an average resident in Japan experiencing a violent crime in a given year are estimated to be around 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 2,000, depending on specific locations and circumstances.
Based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), the chances of an average American being a victim of violent crime are relatively low, with estimates indicating that about 1 in 200 people may experience a violent crime in a given year.
DC is widely considered to be a cesspool of violent crime, but based on data from the FBI and other sources, estimates suggest that the chances of an average resident in Washington, D.C., experiencing a violent crime in a given year might be around 1 in 100 to 1 in 200, depending on specific neighborhoods and other factors.
For the UK, Recent estimates suggest that the chances of an average resident experiencing a violent crime in a given year are around 1 in 250 to 1 in 300.
However, Shropshire, home of the Iron Men, is one of the safer parts of the UK. Recent estimates suggest that the chances of an average resident in Shropshire experiencing a violent crime in a given year could be around 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 2,000. So it’s about as safe there as Japan.
There may be better ways of dealing with violent crime than what Trump is doing. And it may be that Trump is merely using the issue of violent crime in order to ….. to do what exactly? Surely not to turn himself into a 21st century Roman Emperor? I admit that fighting crime may be a pretext for something else entirely. But if I was forced live in a crime-ridden ghettoized city, I imagine that I might well appreciate the presence of more law enforcement on the streets.
As far as I can see, the State has a deep agenda buried beneath the superficial stories and gossip that we the viewers and readers are asked to follow. In his own way, Trump is following that agenda, as was every POTUS before him. The agenda is clearly “The State against the individual.”
We the people are being corralled and controlled similar to the way you corral and control your sheep, pigs, and bison (if you are farming any of them). The State doesn’t want us all roaming around like free-range chickens, scratching our own ground, let alone like wild birds.
An interesting tidbit I found on Twitter. It echos my current theory on The Service Economy.
“I don’t think AI will destroy these jobs because the premise assumes they were created to fill a productive need. I think most of our economy isn’t even connected to being productive.
There are already many jobs today…that could easily be automated without AI.”
Earlier this year, my thesis was that The Service Economy was a shortened name for what I thought was “The Financial Services Economy” since lots of debt seems to be required for The Service Economy to work. More recently, I thought about demographics …a growing population of old people with money who need menial tasks performed for very low wages. Then, it hit me. The service economy needs a lot of servants. Servants are more important than paying back debts or “making stuff.
Throughout this history of civilization, wealth and status was often defined by how many servants one had. To this day, I think most people will define wealth by how many services like Uber, landscaping or home health aide than proper nutrition or “cheap energy”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEbbGyNkR2U
A talk on AI by a level headed Canadian. Much different than the Ashkenazi who demands trillions of dollars for himself from stupid politicians.
Rich Sutton says in his abstract:
He starts out with this chart:
I doubt what this fellow is hoping for is do-able, but it he can get somewhere, more power to him. Trying for the system to learn in real time, (one of the things he talks about) will be a major challenge, I would bet.
What happened to just educating children who become adults who can go on and perform the tasks we seem to need AI to perform so badly? Are humans getting worse at learning or something?
Families want their children to be rich.
We want the tasks AI performs to be essentially provided free.
These two objectives don’t work together.
Money is necessary, but not sufficient.
Dennis L.
Second thoughts on this one. I would take IQ over money any day, but I would also want family and the experience of generations.
We have a highly intelligent commenter who sometimes appears to mention the Jews. Orthodox Jews apparently have many arranged marriages, the parents chose. There is wisdom in that in that the families have learned much of life.
With intelligence and a working set of values, money will come which is not an end in itself but a means which makes other things possible. One can chose wisely or poorly. Learning everything only through youth results in many mistakes and lost time which cannot be regained. Families and culture can help avoid those errors, Money has no history.
Some of you may note I often times mention Amish and Jews in the same context. They both take off the sabbath, they both celebrate the family and they the Amish have made efforts to have their children marry outside the local group; Ed’s concern.
Some social conventions we may disagree with, but in the real world the ultimate test is do they work, empiricism.
Dennis L.
A lot of Far Eastern areas use arranged marriages, as well. It seems to be an approach that works.
What amazing is the Canadian government is doing a great job of promoting research. Alberta is a hub of AI research.
Older people might remember the Company Store. In mines or some other jobs the workers lived in remote areas, and the Company Store had a monopoly over the workers, charging exorbitant prices for necessities and often extended credit with a high interest, putting the workers at indentured status for life. If someone felt like going to some faraway store, the person would be fired.
Such was the norm, and like the movie Mystic River, based upon Dennis Lehane’s book, the General Store owner basically was the town’s boss and NO ONE crossed the owner.
Some people wishing for starship or some other long shot contraption to deliver prosperity for them in perpetuity seem to not understand history or human nature at all, misusing Pareto’s law, to describe situations in early 20th century, or misappropriating anything to hold their hats.
Even starship or whatever might bring prosperity , it will NOT be shared by anyone who didn’t have a stake on it. Like Ferdinand and Isabel, who put even Columbus in jail to avoid sharing the riches of the New World. And, unlike these monarchs, who had no way of controlling those who fled to the Americas and did not return, today’s winners have plenty of ways to make sure none of these gains are wasted upon people who have no stake in it. Do not quote biology or some other unrelated stuff. In primate colonies, the chief male gets all the females, and the rest none.
The wealth gap might be 1:1 million, or 1:1 billion, or 1:1 trillion. At such level money becomes meaningless. Everyone is owned by one of these moguls, those not part of it being eliminated through denial of access to resources.
tl. dr. There is no escape for the ordinary chaps, and a very slight possibility for those at the top to escape the coming collapse, and they are NOT going to share the exit tickets with others.
One thing an ordinary chap can do is become an ordinary woman. You don’t have to be the wealthiest, strongest or the most clever if you are a woman. Being average is enough.
Caitlyn Jenner has probably figured this out.
Which won’t do too much good in resource poor societies. Chinese eunuchs died in dire poverty after the Empire fell. In 1960s the PRC tried to recreate the Imperial banquets and assembled any surviving eunuchs in there, and most of them were too young to remember that. Only one eunuch who was old enough to remember that survived 50 years after the end of empire , and she (eunuchs are referred as ‘she’ in some cultures) had developed dementia. So there are no Imperial banquets surviving, only fakes.
I believe PV can make PV. PV is just sand, yes highly pure Si but no mining is required. The zone refining used to purify Si is purely electric.
Yes if massive cement and steel supports are needed then maybe not but PV farm I see in my area NE US are pretty frail.
I also believe that after 20 years if efficiency goes down a simple heat treatment will bring it back or worse case grind off the top 10 microns and re-implant the junction.
If IC lasts a few decades, perhaps we could even engineer plants to separate minerals into different bulbs. There is a lot that could happen with greater intelligence, in my view it’s a question of buying time and reducing the burn rate. And not everywhere needs to maintain IC for some part to survive long enough to advance further.
It can be made. Very inefficiently.
I do not follow. ???
Solar energy is not used to power industry even though it looks like the lowest cost. When will it be used to make pv from mine to factory? Not until FF is not viable anymore. Then the PV synthetic diesel comes into play but can it produce enough to maintain the current pv?
Ethanol is another fuel that looks viable but with no oil how long can corn be harvested using only ethanol. When there’s not enough you could still run the tractor a little longer by harvesting with cheap efficient slave labor.
With AI we should be able to model these scenarios easier to see things better without trial and error over the next 100 years.
utter BS
Photovoltaic panels require quartz mined from, obviously, a mine. Desert sand contains too many impurities. Sand, geologically speaking, is a granular material composed of finely and several mineral particles. In it you can find carbonates, volcanic remnants and so on.
So this quartz must be heated to around 2000°C using coke, whose main use is not only to provide heat (provided mainly by electrodes) but to remove the oxygen from the quartz (SiO2). So actually, you need a reducing agent, electricity alone is useless.
More details on the silicon refining process can be found here.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335083312_Why_do_we_burn_coal_and_trees_to_make_solar_panels
Below a great video made by pragmatic Norwegians.
@Ed
“, yes highly pure Si but no mining is required.”
WHAT? You didn’t ever read up where pure sillicate as raw material comes from and how it is processed, did you?
Sibelco in Spruce Pine and all
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/02/self-termination-history-and-future-of-societal-collapse
He’s a doomer too but for different reasons.
Does he have it backwards? Equality just depletes faster the wonderful stuff that makes us equal.
Is concentrated wealth just a symptom of making that equality stuff.
How about using glittering brass on insolent suitors? Visit Animal Farm.
Too bad god made everything with science and math; dang exponentials.
I think equality depletes because of the need for increased complexity to maintain the functioning of the system.
Complexity requires bigger businesses, or more international trade, or the use of debt. More technology fits in this category, as well. But the leaders in all of these areas require larger wages. There usually isn’t enough left over for the rest to be more than serfs.
CEO-to-worker pay gap surges to 632 to 1 at US’s lowest-paying large firms, study shows
The Guardian
At 100 firms in S&P 500 with lowest median pay, executives’ comp increased by average of nearly 35% over five years
As executive remuneration ballooned, the average CEO-to-worker pay gap across the 100 companies in the S&P 500 with lowest median worker pay – dubbed the Low-Wage 100 by the Institute for Policy Studies – widened by 12.9% between 2019 and 2024, from 560 to 1 to 632 to 1.
“Median pay increased only modestly, whereas CEO pay really skyrocketed,” said Sarah Anderson, director of the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, and author of the report.
Between 2019 to 2024, CEO pay at these companies increased by 34.7%, unadjusted for inflation, compared with a 16.3% increase in these firms’ average median worker pay during the same period – short of inflation, which came to 22.6% over the same period.
Starbucks’ CEO pay was the largest gap in 2024, with its CEO, Brian Niccol, receiving total compensation worth $95.8m, 6,666 times as much as the company’s $14,674 median pay.
“It’s a stunning message for Starbucks management to send to their workers who’ve organized unions at 570 stores in recent years, and they’re still waiting for the company to negotiate a contract. It says a lot about who they really value at that company and who they don’t,” said Anderson.
Starbucks did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the report.
PS. The City where I live pulled a fast one at a meeting. Up for a discussion was (another) pay increase for the Major and Commissioners. Well, it wasn’t just discussed but out of the blue they passed it on an unannounced vote!
$400,000 a year each with lifetime health benefits for themselves and family members and perks….this was deemed a part time employment….go figure…uproar and the Mayor wrote an editorial in the paper to justify it.
Riches for the few!
Much worse before Chucky Fitzclarence and his 200/400 chimney sweeps, farmhands and railhands ‘did their duty’.
https://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/economics/history/paper43/43atkinson.pdf
1913
0.05% had 8.84% of all income of UK
0.1% had 11.64%
So the 99.9% had to do with 88.36%
On average 0.09% for each 0.1%
Of course, among the remainder, the top 1-5% would take more than half of the rest
11.64/0.09 = 129.33
So many things were screwed up because the kind of people the Duke of Wellington had derided as ‘the scum of the earth’ did ‘their duty’ and a forest ranger’s descendant like Robert Firth was now able to sneak into Oxford.
It’s like the old saying “Communism works in theory”.
But doesn’t in reality because people will learn to cheat the system (tragedy of the commons).
That’s the whole logic behind doing everything digital and putting limits on consumption (quotas or rationing). Then you could make everything pretty much fair. So communism could work and overcome the “tragedy/commons” trap.
Tragedy of the commons was a capitalist lie invented in service of industrial privatization.
I’m not sure the problem is tragedy of the commons.
More often it is a problem of population overshoot. There often are plenty of resources to begin with. But if the population rises, no one has enough. This is when the problems start.
Right. The early industrial privatizers weren’t happy with the low-profit, ‘low’ carrying capacity of agrarianism. They wanted to intensify civilization with fossil fuels and urban wage labor. Jack up the carrying capacity, jack up the profits.
That’s not how it happened, you revisionist.
Population became too high for medieval serfdom. Specifically, pre-industrial technological innovations most likely reduced the amount of human labor on farms before industrialization.
agricultural and industrial innovations overlapped in the 18th c.
instead of 4 farmworkers producing enough to support 1 extra person, they prodiced enough to support 2 persons.
that concided neatly with industrial innovation—that 1 extra person found work in mines and factories.
it was a gradual process over a cebtury or more—but that is effectively what happened….there was no great ecomomic plan involved…
that is what kicked off ”economic growth”…
gueset I gather that you’re not using the term revisionist neutrally. how is your industrial saying “Population became too high for medieval serfdom” functionally any different from me saying ” The early industrial privatizers weren’t happy with the…‘low’ carrying capacity of agrarianism?” Functionally the same, but qualitatively different, because you choose to politically characterize the carrying capacity of the commons as inadequate, and that’s not an ecological, scientific, neutral position like mine.
“Specifically, pre-industrial technological innovations most likely reduced the amount of human labor on farms before industrialization.”
To actually be specific instead of just paying lip service to specificity, you need to actually be specific about the innovations and their effects, or you’re not actually saying anything substantive are you?
And you’re also changing the subject to farms when the conversation is about the commons.
The Enclosures lasted 300 years and the steam engine was invented 100 years into the Enclosures.
I talked to someone who was part of a group of perhaps 10 or 15 people who shared a house, and all property, such as vehicles, in common. I got the impression that it was hard to make work well.
One of the issues that came up was how much advanced education the various teen-aged children in the group should get. If they paid for college for one, they almost needed pay for it for the others as well. But they couldn’t afford doing that.
Living only half-way “collectively” but still trying to keep up with the Joneses is a classic example of an American family unwilling or unable to actually change their lifestyle beyond surface level details.
American culture simply won’t allow for it.
Anything more than skin deep change results in you becoming an outcast or being forced to absorb certain negative externalities that only the rich can handle (thus is why “trad wives” are largely a rich person thing, despite the fact that most stay at home moms are actually in the lower half of the income spectrum).
There are some intentional communities that manage to work this out, but long term successful ICs are few and far between.
“ost stay at home moms are actually in the lower half of the income spectrum”
You mean like single moms on welfare?
Even if there is an arrangement where a dozen or so recent immigrants live closely together, there is a lot of pressure for women to work to help support the family because there are so many people to support. Only outright discrimination made stay-at-home moms a social norm. Some would say there are stark racial/cultural differences where some hunter-gathering societies have no concept of a “stay-at-home” mom or a nuclear family or even father participation in the rearing of children and those differences persist in many people recently removed from some hunter-gathering societies and introduced to European lifestyles.
all species are evolved to survive…
that means caring for self partner and offspring…and maybe tribe…
political theories are irrelevant to that., whether communism or capitalism…
I agree but sadly people are short sighted. The dems will load in low IQ folks to be feed by dem sponsored money to keep themselves elected. The fail to consider the long term effects of dumbing down the work force in face teaching the work force to not work.
Happily robots and AI change the whole discussion. We will move to a system of owners where voting no longer done. Then lowering the stress on the ecosystem can be fulling considered. A world of 80 million humans will make sense.
before i get to the lol part—all politicians strive first to keep themselves in office.
now the laughter
a population of 80m will never be able to support a robotic world—and vice versa…
A population of 80m will deliver us back to to the 10th century. With all the mod cons of that period….check it out…
AI etc will require energy input—-there won’t be any
“A population of 80m will deliver us back to to the 10th century.” The human population in the continents of India, and Africa are much higher than the 10th century but many people living there today live like it was the 10th century. There are witch hunts, lots of childhood mortality in rural areas even with all the humanitarian aid from outsiders.
It is not population size that determines the level of technology or civilization alone but I see your point, there is a large overlap.
our current ”western” form of civilisation is sustained by a single common factor…
our ability to produce, buy and sell goods and services to each other.
There is literally nothing else, (though on the face of it there may appear to be)….
reduce our numbers from 8bn to 80 million, and people would be so sparse that there would be no commercial links between people, because trade and shipment requires constant energy input, (to say nothing of the business of manufacturing and production)….
life would be reduced to a walking pace, just as it was 1000 years ago…
and robots would be no use—robots do not buy goods and serivices, they just consume energy. (and there wouldnt be any available)
just trying to inject a dose of realism here btw…
Going under martial law sucks but not as bad as “Sharia Law” over in the UK.
(don’t worry, I’ll let myself out) 🙂
This is a reference I found to Sharia Law.
https://islam-laws.com/what-is-sharia-law/
According to this reference,
It forbids the use of interest, among other things.
Just as rabbinical courts rule over Jews in America sharia courts ruling over Muslims in America makes sense. What ever system people voluntarily agree to is their own business.
Are honor killings part of sharia law? Genital mutilation?
Google says
Under Sharia law, the penalty for adultery (zina) depends on the marital status of the offender: unmarried individuals are typically punished with 100 lashes, while married individuals face stoning to death.
..
despite living in uk all my life, i have managed to avoid that sentence..obviously i have been lucky…
but i will bear it in mind, —-one has to be cautious even at my age…
does shariah law include thinking?
“21:53 You know what happens to children who do get evacuated out of the orphanages or out of blown up buildings to Ukraine?
21:59 Over 60% of them either get sold in the child sex trade or organ trafficking.
22:05 That’s Oh my god. Oh, don’t say, “Oh my god, Sabi, it happens.” And everybody knows it happens. It’s right there in front of
22:12 them. They stop the cars every day going into Romania with the children in there.
22:17 The organs get caught. They found the bodies in the in the in the child organ harvesting factories. This is the
22:23 reality of Ukraine. It’s a disgusting nation full of disgusting people who
22:29 commit the most horrific crimes and we back them up with our taxpayer dollars and we call the Russians criminal. This
22:35 is the truth. But no America wants to hear the truth. No one America wants to hear the fact that Mayor Klitschko, the
22:41 mayor of Ukraine, you know, the boxer, oh, he’s a great guy. He’s a boxer. He runs five whouses that basically traffic
22:49 underage Ukrainian girls who’ve been kicked out of their homes and have no place to go.
22:55 And you know who frequents these whouses? All the Western terrorists who go over there to fight for the
23:01 Ukrainians. Well, they call themselves mercenaries or freedom fighters. Do the research, Savvy. It’s so obvious. . . .
The Ukrainian government is a corrupt government. Zalinski is the mastermind
23:34 of it. He steals so much money it’s not even funny. I mean, Seymour Hirs reported at one point in time that the
23:39 director of the CIA had to go over there and tell him to stop stealing so much money because it become too obvious.
23:45 They estimate he funnels billions of dollars a month into his private account outside of Ukraine. That’s our taxpayer
23:51 dollars that we send there. This is the fundamentally most corrupt place in the world.“?
I don’t know. Bad things happen, especially when parents are in a position to give away children who clearly have problems.
I have a friend who adopted two children from South America, around 20 years ago. One was a 18 month old girl who was clearly badly developmentally delayed. The others was a hyperactive boy.
I know that if I were in her place, I would never have accepted the girl. The boy was somewhat iffy, too. Both of them continue to have problems. The girl still needs a sitter to take care of her, as an adult.
If children such as these are included in the market, it makes sense that the only ones who would want them would use them for terrible purposes. Canada was in the news not too long ago with respect to providing a euthanasia program for unwanted babies with terrible problems, up to one year old, as I recall.
it was common practice here, untill officialdom kicked in, that inviable babies were allowed to quietly die (by medics) to save the burden on the rest of the family
All true of course. Thanks for posting this. It is hardly the only place that became utterly corrupt once the Hegemon touched it. I cringe at the fate of Serbia now…
BAU?
“The findings from Sahin et al. decisively rebut the claim that 100% renewable systems are unworkable from a net energy standpoint. But more importantly, they invite us to rethink the purpose of energy systems altogether. Under the SEV framework, energy is not just a technical input or a traded commodity. “ ??
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-44232-9
https://warwickpowell.substack.com/p/energy-return-and-systemic-exchange
Splendid article. Remind us again how they plan to produce steel, concrete and glass with renewables?
To play devil’s advocate:
* reduce steel usage; switch to aluminum alloys wherever possible, as aluminum production doesn’t require coal or natgas to reduce oxygen, it just requires electricity
* glass and cement require heat, which can be generated with conductive fire-bricks that apparently work up to 1800C, higher than required for either purpose
heat generated with firebricks…
I must make MIT aware of this breakthrough in technology
you seem to have missed the “conductive” keyword
https://electrifiedthermal.com/
“electrically conductive firebrick is the first heating element that can convert electricity to temperatures up to 1,800°C that…”
you said…. ////glass and cement require heat, which can be generated with conductive fire-bricks ////
the implication was that chemical inputs like coal and natgas can be replaced with renewables-sourced electricity
there are numerous scientific papers out there, written by people far better qualfied than me…explaining why this is a delusion
These bricks are made of silicon carbide. some coal will have to be saved to make it. You can not make bricks using bricks. at least 2000C.
drb, (1) wood (charcoal) could even be used and (2) the task is to reduce consumption of non-renewable inputs, not eliminate them. so if this were to reduce net fossil fuels consumption, it would be significant.
we only need to buy time (perhaps a few decades) for greater intelligence to think up alternative systems. the existing system will disappear and so will most of us, which i guess is fine. the most important thing to me is that some system is able to persist that gradually reduces the horror of existence, in which every creature either devours or is devoured by another creature. that’s only normal because it’s all we’ve known.
The first nature link article was eye catching and could not digest the findings in the academic format…but this did catch my attention
“Intersectional impacts of socio-economic-political variations of the available financial mechanisms, direct and indirect effects of climate change, and the extreme events and other impacts on power systems are exempted from the scope of this study. Finally, the directions for further research should comprise a profound analysis of the sector coupling impact on EROI trends.”
Naturally, that is drawback of “modelling”, there is only so much that can be taken into account…..
Thank you for the post, postkey
My key test rather than EROI is, “Without subsidies, can the system make enough money to pay adequate taxes?” I don’t think EROI models make much sense on renewables. You cannot produce renewables with renewables, so the whole concept makes no sense.
Perhaps if one looks at it as power which is energy over time.
Dennis L.
The Travel Agency of Illusions
The fossil endgame is not played with facts, but with stories. What keeps coming back is the “could be” narrative: an endless repetition of promises and possibilities meant mainly to create the impression that the future is still wide open. Russia points to the polar sea, Mexico to shale fields, Libya to offshore blocks. Suriname and Namibia join in as well, each with their own brochure of dream projects.
It is a curious refrain: it could be, it could be, it could be. As if reality becomes pliable through sheer repetition. As if language alone could fill new barrels. It resembles someone reassuring himself by saying he “could just drive to Spain,” while in truth he is boarding an EasyJet flight at three in the morning. The illusion of freedom and potential replaces the stubbornness of reality.
This endless repetition serves a purpose. It lays the foundation for the modern endgame narrative: the idea that when the fossil cards are truly played out, no one can claim that nothing was tried. Every project—no matter how unfeasible—becomes a piece of evidence in the future plea. “We really did our best. After all, we developed Yamal, opened up Mexico’s shale, made Libya’s coast accessible again.” It is a ritual of self-justification.
Thus the fossil sector turns into a kind of travel agency of illusions. The prospectus displays the finest destinations, from Arctic platforms to Mediterranean offshore resorts. But the resorts themselves never open. What remains is the comfort of the promise. The system knows the end is near, but can only keep selling itself by endlessly projecting the future, until the echo of repetition drowns out the silence.
I am afraid you are right:
“The system knows the end is near, but can only keep selling itself by endlessly projecting the future, until the echo of repetition drowns out the silence.?
All of the media need advertisers to finance their systems. They only publicize happily-ever-after narratives, no matter how improbable. No one mentions the possibility that if you buy an expensive vehicle now, its may not have a long lifetime.
We don’t know exactly what will go wrong. Roads may fall into terrible shape. Jobs may not pay well enough to afford a vehicle. Replacement parts, such as tires and fuel pumps, may not be available.
The resorts are fighting for survival they are obviously owned by some very rich people who will not go down without a fight so expect more deflation to come so there will be some good deals out there it will be a slow motion train wreck some of us will lead comfortable lifestyles but the vast majority will be cannon fodder. I’m looking at the world as a shades of grey world not black and white world.
I did a bit of internet research since going to libraries searching all the academic research ever published isn’t a reality, and found various sources claiming that gambling has gone down in recent decades. If gambling has fallen among the middle class, then it makes that gambling establishments, like all the other businesses, are focusing on wealthy customers.
I imagine that non-gambling establishments are facing similar headwinds. The source of their growth in the past, the middle-class, is disappearing.
From what I see, there is plenty of demand from poor people for resorts and gambling but they don’t have money so they don’t exist in the eyes of resort and casino owners. Adonis has suggested, poor people even in large numbers can’t spend enough money to keep resorts going and I think that may be true.
The problem is that the output has to be inexpensive. This is rarely the case.
I watch the life cycle of my chickens: from timid young ones, through aggressive fighters for the best piecies of food and the old ones that are remaining closest to the food source during the night in some corner of the composting place as they do not have energy for hiding during the night in the chicken coop. The old ones die when the cold hits them hard.
We are the same: the extinghuishing bioreactors that are gradually less and less efficient.
That is why the collapse of the human population is usually fast when all the resources are depleted (cheap food, cheap energy, cheap labour).
Other species come and destroy the humans.
It is this continuous victory over other species that remains crucial for the survival of the humans.
https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/about/lyme-disease-vaccine.html
https://www.pfizer.com/news/articles/what_you_need_to_know_about_a_promising_vaccine_candidate_that_may_stem_the_growing_risk_of_lyme_disease
I read recently that in ancient times the average age of folks was between 20 or 30
Human lifespan in ancient periods was much shorter on average than today, often between 20 to 35 years at birth, primarily due to high infant and childhood mortality. However, this average doesn’t mean individuals died young; those who survived childhood could reasonably expect to live into their 50s or beyond.
When infant mortality is removed, evidence seem to show averages of life expectancy for 3000 years ago to be around 52, give or take 15 years.
That makes sense, one really slows down and loses eyesight, reflexes and gains weight at about that age.
Ethel Caterham, who was born Aug. 21, 1909, was recognized in April by Guinness World Records as the oldest person living, following the death of Brazilian nun Inah Canabarro Lucas at 116 on April 30, 2025.
Caterham, Guinness World Records notes, was married in 1933 to her late husband Norman Caterham, who died in 1976. The couple had two children, Gem and Anne. Caterham outlived her kids, as Gem died in the early 2000s and Anne died of cancer in February 2020, at age 82.
Carterham is also a grandmother of three and a great-grandmother of five.
“Never arguing with anyone, I listen and I do what I like,” Caterham said at the time.
Say yes to every opportunity because you never know what it will lead to. Have a positive mental attitude and have everything in moderation.”
This ignores reproduction. Life does not try and endlessly repair, it discards the elements and reconstitutes them into life. Over time in means unknown those elements also adapt into new forms by a process still not understood, it is not evolution. Evolution is what we observe, not how it is accomplished.
Dennis L.
We know that the advantages that fossil fuels give have allowed us to have longer life expectancies than otherwise.
It stands to reason that as oil and other fossil fuels deplete, people would succumb to more diseases. Some of these will be communicable diseases. Others will be related to excessive pollution. Lack of internationally traded medications may be a problem, as well.
I happen to know people who live in third world countries, I can say for certain that without industrialization, life expectancy would be much lower without significant use fossil fuels. Medical services are limited and ambulances are rare.
Healthcare is very expensive everywhere. What seems cheap to people living in developed countries is very expensive to people who live in un-developed (low consumption of fossil fuels) countries. Anyone who claims that it can be magically low cost is being disingenuous.
Pollution for the most part means contaminated water. The pollution is viruses and bacteria for the most part.
Tariff Price Hikes Are About To Hit America Like a Brick
de minimis rule ending minimum 80-dollar tariff on all packages overseas.
But US citizens only have so much money to spend. If prices of some goods go up because of inflation, fewer of them will be purchased. Or purchases of other categories will go down. If higher prices are indeed passed through, the big effect will be recession.
The U.S is already in a recession!!! They have been in recession since 2008!! It’s massive debt spending that keeps people thinking that it is not. Maybe we are headed for deep recession.
trouble is, the gullible are told they can sustain their lifestyle just by voting vor it…
when a fully armed populatio find out they can’t all hell is going to break loose…
you can see now why the orange messiah is putting troops on the streets.
Norm, even the gullible know there is more to it than voting… the gullible are open to killing people who appose their lifestyle. They are also open to taking out loans to get credentials to maintain their lifestyle.
Also, you spelled Moshiach wrong. It’s a glaring error.
my life is full of glaring errors…..(even if I couldnt find that one)
and no—the vast majority do think that votes will change their future of energy decline.
the commercial rule is very simple….
you cannot produce/supply low priced goods within a high wage environment
“you cannot produce/supply low priced goods within a high wage environment”
Very true. Look at wages in the health sector.
The goal , I think is not to produce/supply low priced goods but persuade people into consuming more high priced goods.
Shelter, they openly admit, cannot be constructed to be low cost so every new home or apartment is “luxury”.
Families want their children to be rich isn’t good for the economy because in practice it means sellers of goods and services gouging each other for maximum revenue.
I suspect this… “greed”… as some people label it is behind the declines in productivity that have been witnessed in developed countries.
The smallest tasks are now expensive because everyone wants to get paid well. This can also be called “lazy”.
A.I. may be a workaround around humans who are seeking maximum gain but A.I. is even less efficient than the “laziest”, or “greediest” human.
we need high wages to cover the high cost of energy input in the goods we consume….
it really is as simple as that..
buying low cost goods from elsewhere gives the illusion of wealth—but if you produce those goods in a high wage country, then high wages must be paid to the producers.
wealth then, is a fleeting illusion.–the American Dream lasted from 1945-1970—an eyeblink of history, which we now sustain with frantic debt.
if you dont get that—imagine taking out a bank loan every year, to convince your neighbours you are getting constant payrises.
most of our leaders (not all) think that wages can just go on rising to pay for necessary goods and services…ie—printing money..
but energy cost will inevitably rise above average affordability (as it is doing right now)—no matter how much money is printed, it will not pay for increasingly high energy cost.
you will see fluctuations in this rule, but long term it is immutable…and spells the end of modern civilisation.
My book, The End of More, explains it. Not that it will make the slightest difference..
About the men of the old lost and the women marrying the new men;
I hear it as “My daughter is mating with a black man” but anyways, what happens is the new men have had enough with the old ways, and do not reproduce with the old women.
The tale of Esther is an example. Esther revealing her own ancestry was a big move since that meant any offspring, if any, of her by the Shah would NOT be considered royals since only Persians could produce kings
The Mongols also stuck with that rule. Although there were no shortage of Mongols taking chinese concubines, the offspring were not considered to be Mongols and eventually integrated back into the Chinese, while the purebred returned to Mongolia where they still exist.
Anton Chekhov wrote the Cherry Orchard in 1904, the year he died. Lopakhin, a lower class merchant, made enough money to buy the mansion of a Duke whose wife had squandered all the fortune. Lopakhin had feelings for the older daughter of the Duke, Varya, but she chooses to be a maid in a manor, instead of marrying Lopakhin . Chekhov wrote that the Old and the New cannot mix.
Unions of an upstart and an old family do not really work well. Most likely the union is childless or at most a child who does not reproduce, and everything reverts back to the wife’s old family, her grandnephew becoming the ultimate beneficiary.
Maybe, women are pretty selective; there are exceptions.
Dennis L.
Not very selective if they can rely on government handouts.
I agree, but you and I have probably had a different life, that one is a tricky one.
We are at base biology and biology has rules. You were medical and much of that is an attempt to fix up things which are less than optimal. Biology would not allow them to be and women would not select them, end of that set of genes.
Dennis L.
These days, they select for handsomeness if financial security is not a factor. Hence, the many flings, , and the many men they do not introduce to their social circle because they don’t fit in.
In any case, personality does not come into play. Only when two individuals are in a relationship, do they discover if they are compatible.
Online, people who seek partners occasionally admit that no one reads the profiles and that being able to maintain a conversation is a important.
Extrapolating personal experience to other people’s stiries shows ignorance
That’s what most people do.
Most people also lie about their motivations and the motivations of others because the truth is not pleasant.
The battle of Rocroi, on 1643, was fought between the Spanish, which invaded from what is now Belgium and at that time part of Spain, and the French, led by the Duke of Conde, a relative of the King of France.
It was quite bloody. The French lost 5,000 and the Spanish lost more than that.
At that time battles in Europe were not that huge so a casualty of 5,000 was unthinkable back then, but when asked whether he was moved by such numbers, the Duke answered that a night of passion in Paris would be enough to replenish the losses.
I found it ludicrous that Rome is not Western Civilization, when even now Rome is the seat of Christendom’s largest sect. A lot of laws used now come from Roman laws.
And Russia losing its children is nothing. An ignorance of Russian military history. I think not too many non Russians heard about Zhukov, who never went to bad without claiming 1,000 Soviet casualty every single day. It is nothing in Russian psyche.
A loss of two legged animals is no loss. There are simply too many people, and too many people who do not add anything to civilization. The deaths in the Great War were irreplaceable; the deaths in Korean and Vietnam Wars much less, since the Americans learned the lesson and sent the less educated and less valuable to the front.
A lot of the ‘Russian’ deaths are Muslims in the south and Buddhists in Siberia. No great loss for the ethnic Russians. Contrary to the opinion of Arthur Harris, whose bizarre opinion on the value of the Castle of Dresden probably came from the Shona of Zimbabwe, who only could built a heap of rocks which later showed in its infamous 100 trillion notes (which could buy three eggs), a bunch fusiliers are not worth the castle since they can’t build such structure.
Human life is quite disposable. No more precious than the life of, say, a raccoon or a caribou.
kul, disagree strongly. Be it a racoon or a caribou, both lose against a man. One is a hat and one a steak.
Dennis L.
In the grand scheme of things two legged animals and four legged animals are both just amimals
I had a dentist tell me that many years ago. I agreed with him that he was an animal! I try to aspire to higher things. Man is the jest and wonder of the world at the same time.
Home-purchase contracts in the US were canceled at a record rate, with about 58,000 agreements falling through last month. That’s equivalent to 15.3% of homes that went under contract and the highest cancellation rate for a July in data going back to 2017.
It’s not just that the housing market’s expensive, with elevated mortgage rates and home prices that have soared 50% since early 2020. Buyers are also pulling back more than usual because of uncertainty over the wavering US economy, as inflation begins to rise again and the labor market slows. Plus, with more listings to choose from in many parts of the country, there’s less urgency.
“Buyers are having economic nausea—they’re feeling queasy about the market,” said Jeremy Caleb Johnson, an associate broker with Long & Foster in Virginia Beach. “They want to buy a house, but sometimes it’s too overwhelming when they start to focus on all the moving parts and all the costs involved. Sometimes it’s easier for them to cancel and get some fresh air and breathe.” —David E. Rovella
I can believe that things are starting to change. There are quite a few homes for sale in my neighborhood, and prices seem to be a little lower. At the higher prices and higher interest rates, hardly anyone can afford to buy.
Now, the follow on:
1. Taxes are generally secondary to market value.
2 The most expensive part of property ownership is becoming the insurance.
4. Taxes in the US are deductible, pre tax money,, insurance is after tax money.
It is cashflow, liquidity.
Dennis L.
They wanted inflation in the housing market to create the illusion of wealth and they got it. Now, a significant percentage of buyers and sellers are (probably) corporations (investors) and now they are discovering that few people whether they are recent immigrants or people who have been here for centuries can afford the high prices they are selling them at, especially at high interest rates.
The best case scenario is that corporations sell real estate to each other with all that cash I keep hearing they have and forget about selling to people.
I remember a few examples of the sort, all in the 2007-2008 time frame. Obviously at times of falling prices people feel more squeamish (more realistic). It seems to me that the wise seller should arrange for a short period between informal agreement and appointment with notary. It is during that time that people have second thoughts. sometimes they arrive at the notary and ask to renegotiate the price. big scenes ensue.
A guess: For most areas, a home bought at the height of the 07-08 mania is worth more today than then.
Dennis L.
that would be wrong. there has been inflation. also in the case in point, detroit area, I don’t think housing has ever recovered. I do understand that MN may ot have depreciated as much.
Agree, not universal, but median, my guess would be the house is worth more in nominal terms today than 2008, etc.
Dennis L.
Chicago is next!
Trump to deploy military to Windy City to fight crime!
https://x.com/Lita631/status/1958943457927417962
Link seems to be wrong.
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/will-be-next-trump-says-he-will-send-national-guard-to-chicago-after-d-c/3813513/
Where’s all this violence coming from?
And why is only Trump addressing it?
World crude + condensate production has been nearly flat since 2014 except for Covid
All the growth in “oil” production has been from natural gas liquids .
https://x.com/aeberman12/status/1958558918965105044/photo/1
Here’s why U.S. oil production cannot increase significantly even with WTI above $80/b.
https://x.com/anasalhajji/status/1958860418015011075
Is the shale boom running out of gas ?
https://blog.gorozen.com/blog/gas-time-has-come?utm_campaign=Weekly%20Blog%20Notification&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz–pkkK97eae6aKBGYqdrO7JtyblMAa5dwUbhqv3Wtz0dak5RpYlNKH3ULQZJS2-fTHrAiGbKIKt8IX0rlr1DCt3LkULPA&_hsmi=377132956&utm_content=377132956&utm_source=hs_email
I think it is crazy to keep building LNG export capability when US natural gas production seems to be hitting a peak. Part of the reason for lower natural gas production could be higher interest rates for borrowing–with some of the effects noted for crude oil in the other comment I made.
The speaker in the anaslhijji link was unhappy because Trumps tariffs seem likely to delay or stop completely US LNG export projects. I think stopping these projects is a good idea, if we don’t really have the natural gas.
Maybe the momentum of the productive fracking bubble carries over into a bridge to nowhere gambit for a little while in service of chasing GDP, and then stops.
Building unnecessary LNG export terminals does add GDP, I will have to admit.
The article talks about US natural gas production peaking and declining. I notice that production in the last three months is again up. I don’t know if this is temporary or not.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n9070us1m.htm
Chris Martenson on the gas issue .
This is my favorite image from the video:
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/US-Shale-Growth-Was-Fueled-by-Cheap-Money.png
Very cheap money has been what allowed US oil from shale to explode. With higher rates now, reinvestment is very much hampered.
I don’t think that rates will go low enough to fix this problem.
The US produces relatively more natural gas liquids than the rest of the world. It is no wonder that that EIA decided to emphasize measures that include natural gas liquids.
The first time Mr B has done a podcast his first . The Honest Sorcerer .
https://youtu.be/lgWR1uoAWyg?si=OSTZ9Stev6xaF5AK
I have corresponded with “B.” He says he is an Eastern European. His accent sounds like an Eastern European. This podcast is sound. The introduction says it is about collapse taking place over a period of years. Complexity will be lost.
Not everything is collapsing, e.g. SpaceX. I have noticed more mention of mining the moon, mining asteroids. Starship is not going smoothly, it is a huge project, but Sunday if all is well hopefully mankind makes another step forward.
Humans stumble, but the path is onward and upward. Even the universe does not seem to be what we thought; JWST has literally changed our view. On the bright side, think of all the new thesis for grad students in astronomy.
Yes some things are collapsing, Rome is gone, it was replaced by western civilization and if you were not with western civilization you were ignored or pushed aside. That seems to be how life works.
Russia is losing the war; she is losing her children which is terrible. I suspect the conflict is going as the powers that be desire.
Humans are tough, when we are not enough a new subspecies appears and the old one fades into history. Most likely the women of the old breed with the men of the new and the men of old are lost.
Dennis L.
Interracial children make up a minority of births.
White woman are not hooking up with dark skinned men in significant numbers, although the academic people wants everyone to believe that mixed-race children are common.
‘We Have a Crisis’: Alex Jones Warns That Trump Is Headed for Health ‘Collapse’
“Commentator and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones warned that President Donald Trump is “declining faster and faster” — and headed for a health “collapse” — on Wednesday after the commander-in-chief told Fox & Friends that he wants “to try and get to heaven if possible” one day earlier.
“I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I hear I’m really at the bottom of the totem pole,” continued Trump during the morning show interview.”
https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/we-have-a-crisis-alex-jones-warns-that-trump-is-headed-for-health-collapse/
Basically, Trump is working too many hours a day, with these many long trips and interviews at all hours of the day. He is not getting enough exercise. His ankles look very swollen. Trump is 79. If he were much younger, perhaps his body could put up with the treatment Trump is giving it. But at his age,
Age is age and many here including me will certify that — one can be mentally sharp but physically decay will set in as time goes by . Heck it even defeated Mohd Ali .
What I find hypocritical of the media is that they gave Joe Bidet a pass on his health. They ignored that he had dementia when he was on the campaign trail. When the White House Easter bunny rabbit has to grab you by the hand and direct you off stage because you have NO clue where you are and what you are doing, as they say in Houston, “you have a problem”.
Very swollen ankles means severe potassium shortage. I had it once as I was leaving the US and entering Italy in 2020. I fixed it by picking, steaming and eating dandelion leaves in large amts for two days (I was in the Alps). I bet he gets medical advice of quality similar to the geopolitical advice he receives. Incidentally, in Russia you can buy salt that has not just sodium but also potassium and magnesium (it is the one I use). Such a simple fix.
dont worry
when doctors get round to telling the don the truth
he will just fire them and get docs who tell him what he wants to hear.
Norm,
No sarcasm, sometimes you come across as a bitter old man. Life goes quickly doesn’t it?
Dennis L.
apologies for coming across that way
am not that way at all….
All politics is a futile exercise—regardless of intent…
but the don is a complete charlatan, huckster and ponzi salesman, with his only concern for himself and scamming the nation as a whole—you of course may see him as someting else….that is your privelege.
You dont see it—along with 70m other dupes..
But to put your opinion in perspective, you also offer the truly weird concept, constantly repeated—- of a cubic mile of pt.
ive never been able to figure out what you are going on about, on that score…
Hope, norm, hope. Something which would most likely work without ruining our spaceship earth. It is out there somewhere, whether we can bring it back to earth, or near earth space is another question. It is a metaphor.
Dennis L.
your don is in the process of assembling his version of the SS and preatorian guard.
His ambition and intent knows no limit….
If i was alone is pointing this out, I might have a doubt about it….but I am not.
The concentration camps are being built, there is no shortage of staff to run them…
there will be no shortage of inmates.
I wish i was being humourous…things have gone beyond that now.
According to the conspiritarians I’ve watched on YouTube down the decades, the concentration camps have been built and awaiting occupants since the Clinton and Bush II years. And there are those piles of thousands of black plastic coffins piled up in locations up and down the country. Not to mention all those huge underground bases linked by a vast subterranean network of tunnels that also come up in the basements of Walmart stores.
Norman is correct to be concerned about the possibility of Trump turning into a farcical rerun of Caligula or Adolf, but it sure is kinda interestin’ that he gives absolutely no credence to the equally batshit crazy theories about what’s been going on behind the scenes in the US for decades. In Norman’s world, until Trump turned up trumps, everything stateside was hunky dory and tickety boo.
Tim I don’t know if you can tell from over there but in the US and apparently England, too, given the state norm’s gotten himself into, the Hand is working on its latest masterpiece. It is singlehandedly gaslighting and trolling the anti-conspiracy theorists into being late-entrant conspiracy theorists without ever realizing that they’ve become conspiracy theorists. Really it’s the piece de resistance of the long-running Holocaust Industry set-piece that sees that every religious believer in it has always been a closet conspiracy theorist all along – and a very bad one at that.
How does the benevolent Hand finally usher in the national socialisms? By making the most establishmentarian people think that it has just been defeated. Why didn’t Hitler think of that lol.
It’s the Hand’s Disappearing Act 2.0, for good measure, because Cause and Effect requires triangulation. 3 is the magic number. Those who missed out on the first Disappearing Act now have a second chance. Norm is clearly missing out on this one, too. The Ghislaine DOJ transcript release fully exonerates DJT. Surprise surprise. Yet the truth is out there, with twin aryan Hindus, Mulder Patel and Scully Gabbard hot on the trail. Gen X is in the muthafuckin howse. The Zionist star of David is also the Shatkona of Hindu nationalism. At the center of the latter symbol lies OM, and that’s a state of mind worth encouraging amid the crosscurrents.
https://holocaustcentrenorth.org.uk/blog/nazism-and-hindu-nationalism/
reante….if i knew what you were banging on about….i could maybe formulate some kind of response…
As Ive pointed out before, the man who put hitler in jail, died in a concenration camp.
ditto—soldiers follow whoever pays their wages….
ditto—there will be no shortage of volunteers to staff the camps…
details may vary slightly, but the broad picture does not….the promise of a return to utopian prosperity—if only we ”get rid of the others”—if you cant read that writing on the wall, theres nothing i can offer you.
If the 26 mid terms are negated—the 28 potus will be cancelled–there will be an ”emergency” of some kind.
The pieces are slotting into place right now
There’s gonna be an emergency of some kind alright. Love ya Norm.
Yes, Reante, it does look to me like the Normies and everyone else are being trolled big time.
The biggest trick the Hand ever pulled was convincing the world that conspiracies (apart from minor ones that investigated by the police) don’t exist. That the upper levels of politics and business are as pristine as the air surrounding the peaks the Himalayas.
Yet, as Michael Corleone said, “The higher I go, the crookeder it becomes.”
Norman, when it comes to big politics and big business, all the world’s a stage and everything is a masquerade and a conspiracy hashed out behind closed doors, although these days not necessarily in a smoke-filled room.
You and I will never be able to work out precisely who is a power-holder, who is a puppet and who pulls whose strings. The one thing we can be absolutely certain of is that big politics and big business as it is portrayed, described and reported on in the mass media is a work of fiction, and we are merely the audience. That is why actors and TV performers—Reagan, Schwarzenegger, Trump— often go on to do really well in politics, but such people really go on to become brain surgeons or nuclear physicists.
Your fixation with the Don is tedious (TDS—get it?); he is never going to become an emperor, a tsar, or a dictator, although he may play one on TV, he may even make his horse a senator, and he could well serve as a poster boy for whatever policies the ruling oligarchy wants to push next.
By all means, correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m considering Trump as just another representative for US imperialism and neoliberal capitalism.
Every US POTUS since Reagan has done a bit of invading or at least bombing of recalcitrant third-world countries (as well as second-world countries in the case of Clinton).
To his credit, Biden got US troops out of Afghanistan, and he didn’t get US troops significantly involved in Ukraine, although a lot of US bombs, tanks and missiles were turned into scrap there.
On the contrary, he presided over an invasion of the US by recalcitrant third-worlders, which served US imperialism and neoliberal capitalism at the time.
POTUSes, go figure em.
“As Trump Pretends to Seek Peace w/Russia, He Continues Biden Admin’s Arming of Ukraine 3,350 ERAM missiles are being shipped to Ukraine, WSJ reports; WSJ also confirms literally every missile Ukraine fires at Russia is authorized by the US, together with the fact only US ISR can find targets in the first place and provide data necessary to hit them, these are essentially US strikes on Russia; This admitted, long-standing reality exposes this as AMERICA’S war on Russia, making the Trump administration’s posturing as “mediator” in its own war on Russia particularly dishonest and absurd, and reveals Washington as the primary obstacle to peace; The Trump administration’s pause on missiles strikes on Russia is only to lure Russia into freezing the conflict, if it becomes clear Russia isn’t falling for Minsk 3.0, US missile strikes will resume, additional missiles are already on their way; “?
https://x.com/BrianJBerletic/status/1959495488887263598
post
I think its important not to lose sight of the fact that all wars are fought over resources.
Despite indications to the opposite, our beloved leaders are not blind to the fundamental reality that resources are finite, so they must be aware of what will happen when those resources cost too much for joe average to expend in a wasteful lifestyle.
Germany and Japan declared military wars to grab what they could..
Putin sees Ukraine as his southern breadbasket.
The USA is declaring world economic war for the same reason.
I”m ignoring all the fine detail here, to cut to the quick of their reasoning.
The acquisition of countless $billions is seen as the ultimate resources, that money will substitute for physical materials. Add to that, that AI and robotics and similar claptrap will somehow allow our current lifestyke to go on forever…..and you have the perfect framework for mass del;usion.
This is the origin of Trump….if not him it would have been another nutcase, (he’s surrounded himself with them, people who tell him that covid is a chines plot, and climate change is a hoax.) voted in by those of similar mind…..people demanding MAGA etc…throwing themselves under the bus of authoritarianism in a vain attempt to sustain their fantasy lifestyle.
As i said (on record) many years ago, soldiers follow whoever pays their wages….this is precisely what is happening in US (democrat) cities right now….
It happened in Germany in the 30s, it is happening the USA now…. just as i said it would.
The Lawyer who jailed Hitler eventually died in a concentration camp. Trump is going after everyone who crossed him. They are justifiably scared..
The courts have been emasculated (I know Roberts was bought) and the military has been decapitated.
the ultimate aim is to control the country before resource shortage really kicks in, hence your project 25, a theocratic. dictatorship…. yes, it will get that bad,
Tell me people are not now frightened?? My American friends left because they could. Many others are doing the same… This is first hand information, not 4th hand BS. (I dont make stuff up).
Reante, what do you think could be the next emergency to further the degrowth plan? Nuclear War? Alien Attack? Blackouts caused by Domestic Terror1sts or Global-worming? Deadly Virus From Outer Space? None of these?
The plandemic card seems to me the least likely to be played, but we never know.
degrowth is certain
but there is no plan involved…..
Why?
Because no human being possesses sufficient intellect to devise such a plan
JMS, yeah it’s going to be nuclear. The long-awaited, and very carefully orchestrated Big Nuclear Scare. Not an authentic nuclear dust-up but a choreographed one with the explicit intent to create the global political capital for decommissioning the nuclear power industry that is the only thing that surely threatens the survival of the Elites.
Necessity is the mother of invention and the only thing that makes a Non-Public Degrowth Agenda absolutely necessary to the Elites is the grid-dependent nuclear power industry. Even nuclear weapons do not create an absolute necessity for a DA because disarmed nukes are shelf stable and it doesn’t matter if the grids go down with them in the world so long as they order and supervise their disarming, which they will also do save, perhaps or perhaps not, for a few under their direct control.
So we can expect a Big Nuclear Scare that results in a major release of radiation, as a result of either the Ukrainian or Israeli set-pieces. More likely imo it will be both, because one seemingly unique phenomenon only creates a pattern in the most high-functioning minds capable of lateral thinking, and the Hand is dealing with a world full of underachieving minds, so it will need at least two nuclear disasters in order to set a pattern that creates political justification for a wholesale decommissioning of the global industry which will be the public Manhattan Project of Collapse, on steroids. No easy feat. But it will also come in conjunction with a global peace accord, and it will be how the accord is functionally cemented, along with nuke disarmament.
How they go about manifesting the BNS will be interesting to see. Their options are to directly include nuclear weapons in the causal chain of events that cause nuclear power stations to lose cooling capacity — two birds with one stone — or just have, for example, Zelensky use US missiles to make Zapporhyzia’s spent fuel pools lose cooling capacity. Or it could be a direct, stealth, positron beam Handjob a la 9/11 or Nordstream, though I’m not saying Nordstream was from the beam, I don’t know. It does make sense that if the Hand wants something done right, it will do it itself, if possible, rather via one of its proxies.
Thanks for your answer, Reante.
Anytime JMS.
With The Don out of the way, Norm will finally get to be the top rooster.
well guest—
when you get to be 90, and you can get on your feet and hold an interactive audience for 2 hours without notes, and folks consistently turn up to hear you blathering on about whatever…..
and all your bits function as they should….
and you can deadlift 100lbs without a twinge next morning, swim a mile 3 times a week….
we can maybe laugh at life’s adversities together…
(I used to be on first name terms with my undertaker (younger than me)….now he’s died)
Norman, the only other chap I know who outlived his undertaker was a Transylvanian gent named Count Dracula.
“when you get to be 90, and you can…”
Et cetera, ad nauseam. NP sure matches the Donald for boastfulness.
🙁
lol dem
my doings seem to wind you up—years ago i too expected to be dead or nearly so at this age.
somehow the fact that i’m not seems to bother you, childish denigration of what i do (ad nauseam) don’t know why..
i encourage others to follow my regime, (including yourself)—if you dont, (and I’m guessing youre around retirement age) you’ll likely be mentally and physically dead in 10 years. (the signs are already showing)…
laugh all you want, i’m just telling you how to delay the inevitable.
So now NP is telling me that I want him dead. That has to be the ultimate in “tribute paranoia”. 🙂
But as Oscar Wilde said, “If there’s one thing worse than being talked about, it’s NOT being talked about”, and I suspect that Narcissistic Norman would agree with that. 😉
lol dem
your mental gymnastics are amusing, if nothing else…
Norm is it true that you think Trump is going to make his horse a senator? Is that a Roman thing he’ll be paying homage to? Seems like there must be some kind of interesting backstory behind a calculation like that. Do you think it will help or hurt him? Or do you think he’s just basically untouchable, and not because of his smelly nappies.
trump is not the danger…
the danger lies in the theofascist thinking of those who use him as the useul idiot….
project 25 has been in gestation for many years—suddenly trump popped into the political arena, making the concept possible.
American religious dogma is that of the middle ages—demons, devils, angels, raptures and so on.—and the gullible swallow it.
Millions follw the BS of Copeland et al—a truly evil person, if ever there was one—check him out. But he is not alone.
They want to inflict extreme religiousity on the nation, their beliefs are weird in the extreme… as is the taliban, who are no different.
Norm thanks for the clarification that you see traditional evangelical protestantism as the greatest power player in the US. As you know, political Zionism is that player’s primary political orientation. Notice that political Zionism is getting marginalized big-time within MAGAMAHA, and along with it the Evangelicals are getting marginalized. I mentioned this a couple weeks ago. That trend will only continue as Israel continues to dig it’s own grave. The trend is currently away from the theocratic direction in which you expect things to go. Let me know if you still see it otherwise, and why. Thx
as stress level increase, people cling to myths.
that has been so for millenia
Norm the myth of Progress is the great myth of industrial civilization. The great myth of the extreme minority demographic of evangelical protestantism is rapture when Progress fails. Structurally the Evangelicals have no stake in the game.
agreed…
but they can make life very unpleasant until their credibility runs out.
cults never end well, and generally take down a lot of people with them…
The wars of the middle ages were fought under god-banners.
we are seeing the same again….it just looks different.
All this gripping about how horrible conditions are going to get in the US and how nasty the people, even the evangelicals, are going to get as a result is all very well, Norman.
But aren’t you guilty of fatalism, dogmatism, and religious hatred (as in hatred of people of certain religious affiliations)? Not to mention anti-Americanism?
Don’t you believe that the vast majority of American people, including born-again Christian American people, are capable of being nice, sensible, cooperative, rational, and coming together for the common good?
And don’t you believe that when the going gets tough, the tough get going? And that hard times create tough people and tough people create good times?
Your pessimistic and essentially misanthropic outlook is not really a stone’s through away from Fast Eddy’s “ripping of faces.”
Looked at from a different perspective, a lot of the developments you habitually criticize as the road to fascism or dictatorship can also be seen as milestones on the road to restoring the country to sanity. And from a different perspective again, the same developments can also be envisioned as steps on the path towards a globalized world empire ruled from Jerusalem, Rome, or Geneva, in which the vast bulk of humanity, including Americans and evangelicals, are reduced to digital serfdom and a diet of insects and grass soup.
When you project your perspective on the future at us, are you actually seeing the world at all, or are you just describing a vision you see in your imagination?
I agree, he is giving 100%, but in history he will have been one of the Presidents of the greatest nation to date. Agree/disagree, he did it and overcame incredible odds.
It is interesting that a number of people were so stressed they left the country, will those who did leave behind children? Evern here he has genetic diversity and the best women sought him out, such is the nature of the world. Beautiful women, President, personal 757, now a 747, a few billons to make life easier. Throw in a Nobel and that is not bad. When he passes, he has a state funeral and the whole world comes to witness his passing.
I am his age, I know most is behind me; this changes one’s outlook. What he did not come without giving 100+%, it needed luck but luck is not enough.
I notice everyone he puts on TV is very photogenic, very good at presenting a message. Blonds seem to do very well. He understands selling, opposition spokespersons often have their mouths open, yelling. That is not selling.
Dennis L.
stick to polishing your block of pt dennis
you never know—-it might work like aladdins lamp
The Colorado as a Drained Battery
The latest reports from the U.S. are alarming. Lake Powell, one of the Southwest’s key reservoirs, may reach “dead pool” level by year’s end. That would mean no more water can be released downstream. For forty million people, drinking water is at stake, and at the same time hydropower from the Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams would largely vanish. Together they supply about 3,000 megawatts of relatively cheap, clean power.
The irony runs deep. A century ago, the states bordering the Colorado River divided water rights on the basis of an unusually wet year. They drew up contracts as if abundance were permanent, as if the pie could simply be assumed larger than it really was. That fiction worked as long as dams were built and occasional wet winters came. But after decades of overuse, structural drought, and a warming climate, the story is unraveling.
The consequences go far beyond water. Hydropower is in many ways a giant battery: water stored behind a dam, ready to spin turbines on demand. When that disappears, electricity supply must fall back on fossil plants. That means higher costs, higher emissions, and added stress on a grid already facing a massive and expensive build-out.
And there’s more. Thermal plants—coal, gas, nuclear—all require cooling water. Low river flows or high water temperatures force output reductions. France experienced this in 2022, when EDF had to curtail five nuclear stations because the rivers were too warm. This is the new reality: electricity isn’t just about wires and plants, it depends on rivers and their temperature.
The broader implication is that the entire U.S. energy system is colliding with ecological limits. The electric sector itself, long a driver of climate change, now faces its own consequences: drought, warmer rivers, compromised cooling capacity. As always, the costs will be shifted to consumers through higher rates.
Add in industry and digital infrastructure, and the picture grows darker. Data centers consume vast quantities of cooling water, often hundreds of thousands of liters per day. Fracking, the backbone of U.S. oil and gas production, gulps water in already parched regions. Water scarcity thus threatens not just agriculture, but the pillars of the American energy and digital economy.
What emerges is a classic “nexus crisis”: water, energy, climate, and economy, entangled and amplifying each other’s vulnerabilities. What began as a hydrological error—too many rights granted to too little river—has metastasized into a systemic crisis touching drinking water, electricity, industry, and affordability.
It may be tempting to dismiss this as regional. But power shortages in the Southwest will be backfilled elsewhere. A deficit in one region pulls capacity from another, turning it into everyone’s problem. And the underlying mechanisms—overestimated resources, chronic overuse, denial of ecological limits—are global.
The second law of thermodynamics, our cynical tour guide, smiles from the back of the bus. Order slips into disorder, batteries run dry, rivers empty out. We can spin new stories about electrification, green growth, and smart grids, but the Colorado tells a harder tale: without water, there is no power. And the final stop is already written on the map.
One idea about wind and solar was that they don’t directly use water, so that they would alleviate the water problem. But they can’t be very much of grid electricity, and they tend to drive up electricity costs in ways that are not well modeled.
Gas “peaker? plants don’t use water either, but they are not as efficient as natural gas combined cycle plants, which do use water.
Fresh water is a regional resource. It depends on aquifers that deplete. The more people in the area, and the more industry in the area, the more fresh water is needed.
Fresh water models have been put together in ways that please politicians. This has been part of the problem, too.
It may be that water shortages are a more visible issue than oil shortages.
No sarcasm. Four Corners appears to have been an advanced civilization for its time. Something changed, water? Industrialization can’t be blamed. Somethings just change and we make narratives to hold things together until the next big thing. Humans are mobile, at Four Corners most likely many just went for a walk, somewhere with more water if they made it. With some good women, children and the cycle begins again.
Dennis L.
I’m not really sure why the resource use by computer use is not negotiable. Growth in the I.T. sector since about 2000 has been more about wants than needs.
All the useful applications of computers were in use by 2000.
“digital infrastructure, and the picture grows darker. Data centers consume vast quantities of cooling water, often hundreds of thousands of liters per day. Growth in digital infrastructure and data centers has probably not been driven by banking needs, life-threatening medical procedures, or industrial needs. It looks like it is driven by social needs. Entertainment. Surveillance. Those are wants, not needs. Those wants can be met without data centers.
‘Beep if you think Starmer’s a w****r’ sign removed from road after constant honking
https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/2098681/beep-keir-starmer-sign-removed-dual-carriageway-honking
=================
Very funny, that one. Not easy to manage an over-indebted country post-peak-oil, of course.
Sign said something similar to “Honk if you don’t like Starmer’s policies.”
No one can be happy, if politicians are forced into unpopular policies.
While on the subject of China and Robots.
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/markets-by-sector/technology/automating-pregnancy-through-robot-surrogates/
I don’t believe this. Robots providing surrogate mother services.
https://www.eweek.com/news/china-darwin-monkey-ai-supercomputer/
The Chinese are leading the world in neuromorphic computing. That is computing modeled after biological computing. It has the potential to lower energy use by orders of magnitude. No nuclear power plant needed for ASI.
Darwin mouse 2020
Darwin monkey 2024
I expect Darwin human 2028
The concept is easy. The wire that connects transistor one to transistor two can be at voltage 0mv or 800mv. This is the old fashioned high energy way. In neoromorphic rather than move the whole piece of wire one sends a pulse just one part in a thousand of the wire moves to the high voltage. Just as in a human brain pulses are sent not persistent level changes.
We will see how quickly we figure out how to do this at scale.
There will be a global arms race for robots with AI.
Are they powered by solar batteries?
There you go kul, solar power, a cubic mile of Pt and one can store electricity.
You are getting the idea, keep up the good work.
Dennis L.
Delusion cannot discriminate between sarcasm and reality
The moment I have been waiting for: the rise of the machines.
https://www.rt.com/russia/623361-robots-replacing-ukraine-soldiers/
What can go wrong?
The Ukrainian quoted talks about 15,000 robot killers this year. I would say he needs to think big 15,000,000 robot killers in the next 12 months. Total victory.
wonderful. I bet they are powered either with solar or with cold fusion.
More cannon fodder. But if the US can make the robots (and get paid for them), it might come out ahead.
Putin proposes Chinese troops as peace keepers in Ukraine, as great idea. I would like to see Haitians troops as peace keepers in Banderite lands.
Financial bubbles:
Oil, bubble? maybe not.
Tech stocks? priced in BTC Appl 2004 .00305BTC, .00204 BTC in 2025. Of the seven only Meta is up. I used Copilot.
This site panned BTC, that was not a good trade.
Oil is supposedly the master resource.
2024 USD 82.5, .00140 BTC
2025 USD 62,7 .000.44 BTC.
Don’t have a clear view yet, but suspect this is basic accounting, skip the economics. Economics is all continuous functions, that is an approximation on the best day.
US is having trouble selling debt, my understanding is only the short term is moving now.
Farmland is a quandary, Dalio thinks it is a good, relative bet and will lose the least if I am understanding him correctly. He has billions, makes good bets.
What is a financial bubble? A guess, when you are on the wrong side of a trade. It depends on time and when you wish to buy or sell.
BTC’s strength? It is essentially truthful, that has great value; it is information which can be set equal to energy.
From Copilot:
BTC Globally Traded good sample size
Non revisable – historical data clean
Volatile which gives a wide distribution, but that reflects its global nature.
On this site many are negative BTC, put me positive.
My conclusion, in BTC we are not in a financial bubble, stocks are fairly valued would be the implication. Liquidity is going to be a challenge.
Now, just for Kul, “Has anyone seen my cubic mile of Pt?”
Dennis L.
BTC is a strange kind of “money.”
BTC is mostly based on burning “stranded” fossil fuels–ones that are located in inconvenient locations. This gives more funds to the companies that are developing fossil fuel resources. It helps to keep fossil fuel (particularly coal and natural gas) prices up.
The system seems to provide demand for US Treasuries, also. That can be a plus for the system, too.
The total “money” supply, including BTC, seems to increase even more. That helps keep people happy. But I would think it would add to inflationary tendencies.
BTC seems to be independent of governments, but I am doubtful that it really is.
Btc supposed to be ‘digital gold’. In a tokenized system, real physical gold has a token. Fully trusted (what a tokenized system needs to be) each ounce is a token. So, why would one buy btc if one can buy the real thing. Fully adopted, synchronized Know Your Customer (kyc) ‘compliant’.
Watch your back.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BQkDiGUo19o&pp=ygUUQWxqYXJyYWggc3RhYmxlY29pbnM%3D
Key; failing currency system being tokenized. Socialize losses. Like; always. Tokens only realized accepting ‘stable coins’. Next up; stbgld funds. Pick your leverage AND your motrgage rate. Now on Amazon Primate.
I disagree or something like that. Sentient beings need a way to transact, it can be immediate at POS, or it can be stored but what one really wants is to trade one set of skills for those of another. This can also be getting something immediately vs deferred.
The means of exchange must be fair and there will always be a cost, issuing “money” has a cost of printing as well as a cost of inflation. As long as the exchange of skills works net, all is well, when that stops money loses its usefulness.
Children are wealth, they are self reproducing and 1 out of 5 will be very good, Preato. Chose your parents well.
Dennis L.
Everyone says no one is buying USTs because of the $37 Trillion debt. But this guy says otherwise. Foreigners may actually be selling treasuries because they need dollars (Eurodollars) to participate in trade agreements, the majority already having been established in dollars long ago. Paradoxically, there may be a shortage of dollars. Eurodollars are outside the US control. The BRICS attempt to establish alternatives to SWIFT and the dollar as payment notwithstanding.
This guy does tend to ramble, get wordy, and scramble topics, but this is the gist of what he’s saying. Whether true or not, all of this is way over my head.
Look, we really don’t know. They can buy the debt themselves with printed money. The only measurable they can’t simultaneously control is the purchasing power.
Good point!
Slight problem with the BTC ‘value’ in 2004, before the first bitcoin existed.. The BTC was produced on January 3 2009….
I am posting this 10 minute read on desalination. Many countries are going to face a water problem and Spain heads the list in Europe.
The Desalination Paradox: Die of Thirst or Burn Alive
No pipeline will ever replace raincloud
https://medium.com/southern-winds/the-desalination-paradox-die-of-thirst-or-burn-alive-ebdea884abd2
This is behind a paywall for me. A few of my thoughts.
Desalination is very costly, relative to getting water out of a nearby well or stream. The quantity of water made by desalination is tiny, relative to what an area uses.
Desalination also leaves the desalinated water without necessary minerals. Without the necessary minerals, the health of nearby people tends to deteriorate. Adding minerals back in further escalates costs.
https://archive.is/https://medium.com/southern-winds/the-desalination-paradox-die-of-thirst-or-burn-alive-ebdea884abd2
Archive.IS is your friend, and often opens paywalls. Today it is running a little slow… but its still running.
Thanks! Among other things, the article says,
Later, regarding the pre-filtration process used in desalinating water, it says:
Water is one of the resources that we are short of. This article doesn’t talk about how we got to this point. Part of the problem is too much industry (including mines) using water. Part of the problem is too many people needing goods and services that are water dependent. Climate change is the least of the problems.
We could see a crash in oil production in Iraq and Iran because of the water crisis caused by climate change. This was not thought off earlier. Food or oil?
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/10/irans-triple-crisis-is-reshaping-daily-life
https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20250811-nationwide-power-outage-hits-iraq-as-heatwave-pushes-grid-to-breaking-point
Growing Middle East population has been part of the problem as well.