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We are starting to see the beginnings of deglobalization: Countries are increasingly at odds with each other. There is wider disparity among political parties. Trump is making what look to many people like unreasonable demands, both within the US and around the world.
I believe that there is an underlying problem that most people are missing. A worldwide shortage of diesel and jet fuel is forcing international trade to begin moving into a new downward phase, relative to the recent share of GDP shown on Figure 1.
While international trade grew as a percentage of GDP between the 1960s and 2008, it has been basically flat since then. Now the shortages of diesel and jet fuel are forcing the international trade percentage to start falling to a lower level.
In this post, I will try to explain the situation further. One conclusion: Conflict results from the need to reorganize the world economy in a way that uses less long-distance international trade.
[1] Background: The world economy is a dissipative structure, operating under the laws of physics.
The economy behaves differently than most researchers assume because economies are dissipative structures, operating under the laws of physics. Most researchers model tiny parts of economies, and because their views are so narrow, they reach misleading or wrong conclusions.
Most structures that we see, such as books or houses, are, in a sense, dead. Dissipative structures, however, are different in that they can temporarily grow. In order to stay away from being in a dead state, they need to “dissipate” energy of the proper kinds, in adequate amounts. Examples of dissipative structures include plants and animals of all kinds, ecosystems, and hurricanes.
The human body is a dissipative structure that requires food to stay away from a dead state. Hurricanes are dissipative structures that dissipate the heat of a warm body of water.
If an ecosystem doesn’t get enough energy of the right kinds, it will adapt to accommodate the actual mix of fuels and other resources available. If an ecosystem doesn’t get enough sunlight, or enough warm temperatures, or enough water, it will gradually shift toward a different mix of plants and animals that can operate within the mix of resources available. This is similar to what happens within the human body. If a human doesn’t get enough food, their body will shrink or become thinner.
I believe that without adequate diesel and jet fuel, our economy will make a transition analogous to a human going on a diet, or analogous to an ecosystem changing when a different mix of resources is available.
Academic researchers around the world have misunderstood how the process works because they tend to work in ivory towers. They create models based on the narrow view of the economy that their academic area considers appropriate. Once they have developed a narrow model, they cling to it, even though recent insights from physics suggest that a very different model is more appropriate.
[2] Researchers in academic settings make many unwarranted simplifications in their models.
Researchers like to assume that all energy is alike. Substitution is assumed to be relatively easy and quick. Models tend to indicate that if the supply of energy is inadequate, prices will rise. With these higher prices, the economic system will keep problems away practically indefinitely.
The real world doesn’t work this way. When we eat food, we cannot simply substitute kale for all our other food consumption and expect to thrive, even though models would seem to suggest that kale is good for us. Within ecosystems, it is the mix of resources and predators that matters. If the top-level predator is killed off, the system will change. The world economy will face similar changes if today’s international transport system runs into difficulties.
[3] The fuels especially used for international transport today are diesel and jet fuel.
To be useful in international transport, fuels need to
- Be energy dense
- Be easy to store
- Match current infrastructure, unless change is many years away, and system is rebuilt
- Be inexpensive; not require a lot of capital investment in infrastructure to support
Diesel and jet fuel have long been the prime fuels used for international travel and transport. “Bunker fuel,” which tends to be heavier and more polluting, has also been used. Its use is strongly discouraged today because of pollution issues.
[4] An issue we have today is that diesel is also essential for many other uses.
Diesel is an essential fuel today for food production and local transport. Most of the agricultural equipment now in use operates using diesel fuel. Diesel-powered machines can easily navigate muddy fields. In addition, diesel also powers most of the heavy semi-trucks around the world. These trucks deliver goods of all kinds, locally, including food.
Another essential use for diesel is building and maintaining infrastructure. This would include:
- Roads
- Bridges
- Pipelines
- Commercial buildings
- Factories
- Electricity transmission lines
- Building and maintaining structures used to produce electricity, such as nuclear power plants and hydroelectric plants
The importance of diesel to the economy is difficult for most people to see because these are behind-the-scenes types of activities.
[5] It is very difficult to get the price of diesel to rise for any extended period.
If the price of diesel rises, the price of food tends to rise. This happens because diesel is heavily used in food production and transport. Needless to say, high food prices tend to be unpopular with voters. For this reason, even if the diesel supply is low, the price of the fuel doesn’t necessarily rise. If this happened, voters would be very unhappy. They would elect new politicians.
What, in fact, tends to happen is that oil prices (not just diesel and jet fuel prices) tend to bounce up and down. Figure 2 shows a chart of average annual oil prices.
Figure 2 smooths out some of the price irregularities. For example, there was a very high peak in July 2008, but the price fell to a low level by December of the same year. The peak doesn’t appear very high on this chart, but it greatly affected financial markets. See my article, Oil Supply Limits and the Continuing Financial Crisis.
[6] Diesel and jet fuel disproportionately come from oil that is quite “heavy.” Oil refineries tend to offer lower prices for heavy oil, making it unattractive to extract.
There is a price compression problem with heavy oil:
- Heavy oil tends to be difficult to ship because it doesn’t flow through pipelines well. It often needs to be heated, or diluted with a very light oil, to make transportation possible.
- To make matters worse, heavy oil quite often contains sulfur and other impurities that need to be removed, adding refining costs.
- The problem is that these higher costs cannot easily be passed on to the ultimate consumers of diesel and jet fuel. For example, food production and transport depend significantly on diesel, and sometimes even on jet fuel. Consumers of food do not like high food costs.
Because of these issues, the prices refineries are willing to pay for heavy oil tend to be lower than the prices they offer for “light, sweet” oil. For example, the current oil prices shown on OilPrice.com are $70.51 for Brent Crude (a light, sweet European crude), $65.13 for West Texas Intermediate (a sweet US crude) and $50.86 for Western Canadian Select, from Canada’s Oil Sands. Russia also has moderately heavy oil; Russia’s Urals blend is diluted to make it flow adequately. Its price is listed at $54.48.
These pricing issues make the extraction of heavy oil, especially very heavy oil, unattractive to oil companies. Basically, oil prices do not rise high enough, for long enough, to make extraction profitable. People who look at the Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) of resource extraction would say that the EROEI is very low. In other words, a huge amount of energy needs to be invested to make heavy oil extraction possible. This tends to make the cost of oil extraction expensive.
Because of this price compression, and thus the low prices paid to oil producers, it is not very profitable for oil companies to extract heavy oil. This means that governments cannot charge these companies very high taxes, or they will stop producing oil completely. In addition, tax revenue collected from oil producers tends to fall too low to provide adequate government services., and it also becomes difficult to pay workers adequate wages. These issues lead to unrest in countries with heavy oil reserves, but not much other industry, such as Venezuela.
[7] A naive look at the oil data received from the various agencies does not disclose the nature of the world’s oil problem.
A chart summarizing the consumption of different types of oil, based on data from the 2025 Statistical Review of World Energy, is as shown in Figure 3. Note that the Diesel+Jet Fuel layer is the product grouping with the largest consumption. In the US, we hear a lot about Gasoline, but Diesel+Jet Fuel is the layer with the greatest fuel consumption. Diesel+Jet Fuel provides a huge quantity of services, but its usage is mostly hidden from sight.
Most published data show only the sum of the four layers in Figure 3. It seems to be rising. This amount represents a combination of quite a few types of oil. When this increasing production is considered along with the reported high oil reserves (particularly heavy oil in Canada and Venezuela), and the belief that prices will always rise if there is a shortage, most researchers cannot imagine that a problem might be occurring.
Researchers often overlook how crucial oil is to the economy. People all over the world need food, roads, and many other things that depend on oil. The number of people who can make an adequate living seems to depend upon the oil supply. It makes sense to look at oil supply per capita. The chart below uses the same amounts, divided by world population. On this basis, world oil consumption is flatter. In fact, per capita oil supply has been somewhat declining recently.
The other thing that becomes apparent from this chart is that the overall mix of products coming out of current processes (extracting and refining oil) has been getting lighter over time. This should not be surprising because the most rapidly growing oil supply since 2008 has been tight oil, extracted from shale in the United States. This tight oil tends to be quite light, adding output to the Light Group and to Gasoline, far more than to Diesel+Jet Fuel or the Heavy Group.
[8] The pattern of diesel supply growth provides insight into what is going wrong with world trade.
Diesel is about 78% of the combined grouping Diesel+Jet Fuel. The two are similar enough that refineries can slightly change the output mix between the two.
The World Trade Organization began operation in 1995. Its purpose was to encourage more world trade. The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 encouraged countries to cut their own CO2 emissions. The easiest way to do this was by sending manufacturing, mining, and other industries to other countries around the world. Thus, indirectly, the Kyoto Protocol also encouraged world trade. Figure 5 shows that between 1995 and 2008, per-capita world diesel consumption was increasing. The restriction in supply that began around 2008 corresponds with the flattening of world international trade shown in Figure 1.
[9] Several issues contributed to the drop in per-capita diesel supply starting about 2008.
(a) In the period before 2008, there was relatively more oil in the Heavy Group that could be refined into Diesel + Jet Fuel (Figure 4). Notice how the Heavy Group layer gets narrower, especially between 1980 and 2008. The Heavy Group includes end uses such as lubricants, waxes, and asphalt. It also includes some heavy oil consumed in close to an unrefined state, such as bunker fuel for ships. Burning such oil is very polluting, so laws have been changed to discourage its use. Simple refining could transform oil such as bunker oil into diesel and jet fuel.
(b) A technique called hydrocracking can be used to transform long hydrocarbon molecules, such as the ones that make up asphalt, into shorter ones. The EIA in 2013 reported, Hydrocracking is an important source of diesel and jet fuel. This technique is expensive, however. It needs a high selling price of crude oil for the economics to work. If the price of oil is high enough, it makes sense to make less asphalt, and more diesel oil and jet fuel.
(c) Price differentials tend to discourage the development of heavy oil fields. As documented in Section [6], the price refineries are willing to pay for heavy oil tends to be quite a bit lower than the price of lighter oil. In the early days of extraction, medium grades of oil tended to give a range of products, from light to heavy. But peak conventional oil took place about 2005, forcing oil companies to extract both very light grades and very heavy grades, with the hope of combining the two types of output to meet the needs of society. Since 2008, the growth in light oil extraction has been spectacular, particularly in the US, with its tight oil from shale. But growth in the heavy oil supply has tended to lag.
(d) Depletion is an issue for oil supplies. As with many other resources, the oil taken first is the oil that is easiest to extract and the closest to where the end product is to be used. The oil that is left for later tends to be higher cost to extract and transport. High-cost oil is likely to produce high-cost food. High-cost food tends to upset family budgets, making voters unhappy.
(e) Political issues play a role as well. A major issue is the low profitability of heavy oil extraction because of its low sales price to refineries. With low profitability, tax revenue based on oil royalties tends to be low. Without adequate tax revenue, leaders of countries producing heavy oil for export tend to become belligerent. Examples include Venezuela, Russia, and Canada. Within the US, California produces heavy oil.
[10] The world order seems to on the verge of radical change.
We are now facing a situation in which the world economic order seems to be breaking apart, in order to form a new order that “works” better with the changing quantity of Diesel+Jet Fuel available.
We are dealing with a situation that has much in common with a game of musical chairs.
The game of musical chairs is played in rounds. At the beginning, there are as many players as chairs. In each round, one of the chairs is removed. The players walk around the circle of chairs until the music stops. When the music stops, all the players try to grab a chair to sit on. There can be small fights over who gets a chair. The person who does not get a chair is eliminated from the game.
When an economy is faced with an inadequate supply of Diesel+Jet Fuel, it needs to regroup in a different way. To do this, some existing businesses and governments must fail, so that others can take their place. In addition, supply lines need to be rearranged to use the resources that are actually available. Customs and beliefs may need to change, as well.
The way nations interact can change as well. In the years of growing international trade, (1970s to 2008), co-operation seemed to be important. Working together was relatively easy. During the tearing down stage, which seems to be starting now, the situation can be expected to be very different. We can expect assertive leaders, and lots of conflict. We are facing this strained situation today.
[11] What lies ahead?
I don’t think that any of us know for certain what will happen in the future. Nevertheless, the self-organizing world economy seems to be organizing for itself what is ahead. Or perhaps, the hand of a Higher Power is organizing what is happening.
I have only discussed the problem of inadequate Diesel+Jet Fuel, and its impact on international trade and some other parts of the economy. There are other shortages that the world economy needs to work around, that I have not touched on:
In many parts of the world, one shortage is of fresh water. This is often connected with depleted aquifers and today’s high human population.
Another shortage relates to the critical minerals required for a high-tech society. Billionaire Robert Friedland describes the issue in this video. We have plunged headlong into high tech goods of all kinds, including wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries, computers, and electrification of many kinds of things without realizing that we would soon reach limits in the supply of many minerals used in making these high-tech devices.
For many of these minerals, China controls the vast majority of these critical minerals. Countries must try to start producing their own critical minerals, or remain on good enough terms with China to purchase some of the limited supplies available.
A third shortage relates to nuclear, and our plans to ramp up nuclear energy. As far as I can see, uranium extraction is currently constrained. In theory, it can be ramped up, but it takes a long chain of events to do so.
With these shortages, AI seems to be constrained in how quickly its use can be expanded. It needs to become far more energy efficient to be truly useful.
With all of these issues, it seems impossible to keep forging ahead as we have done in the recent past. We are being forced to source more of our manufactured output locally. We need to greatly reduce the transportation of goods across the Atlantic and Pacific. Using tariffs seems to be a way of trying to accomplish this change.
Strange as it may seem, some of Trump’s policies make a certain amount of sense, when viewed in the light of the issues the world is facing. I expect that a replacement leader would be just as abrasive. The new leader would likely have different strange policies, but the underlying problems are structural. The new leader would likely also face difficulties in trying to fix today’s problems.
I am afraid we will have to wait for the self-organizing economic system to find a solution for us. Perhaps innovations can bring us new ways of doing things that will eventually work around these difficulties. But, for the near term, higher levels of conflict because of resource shortages seem likely.
I think the problem is likely both the uranium fuel and the enrichment of the uranium. This article talks about the enrichment of the fuel being a problem.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/business/as-demand-grows-us-nuclear-energy-industry-faces-looming-crunch-in-reactor-fuel-supply-5985712
As Demand Grows, US Nuclear Energy Industry Faces Looming Crunch in Reactor Fuel Supply
Experts laud $2.7 billion outlay to rebuild nation’s capacity to enrich uranium but warn it may take a decade for domestic production to meet burgeoning need.
“If America wants to lead in advanced reactors, we have to do the nuclear fuel here,“ Centrus Energy Senior Vice President Patrick Brown told more than 400 nuclear industry professionals on Feb. 12. ”Make no mistake about that. Unfortunately, we’re really building from zero.” . . .
Brown said that with the global nuclear fuel market already constrained, domestic industry’s scramble to revive enrichment—a process American companies invented and once dominated—is now a race to have supply available to meet demand as new reactors come online.
An opinion piece in the WSJ.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/washington-inflates-credit-scores-and-another-housing-bubble-ee127438
Washington Inflates Credit Scores and Another Housing Bubble
Why is the Trump administration continuing the Biden push for ‘inclusive’ credit scores?
At least the Biden FHFA required lenders to submit to Fannie and Freddie both a FICO [the longtime standard] and VantageScore [a company giving very generous credit scores] for all loans. Mr. Pulte, however, announced last summer to much fanfare that lenders would be allowed to choose which score to use when underwriting mortgages. The end of this story writes itself.
Lenders will always choose the higher score so they can make more mortgages to risky borrowers—and at lower rates. Fannie and Freddie charge higher fees to insure mortgages for borrowers with lower credit scores. That means Fannie and Freddie will guarantee riskier mortgages and charge less for doing so. . .
The consulting firm Milliman predicts default rates will rise by some 30%. . .
. . . lenders and credit firms can foist the costs onto taxpayers. Privatized gains and socialized losses, just as America experienced 20 years ago. Mr. Pulte was a teenager during the inflation of the 2000s housing bubble. Still, you’d think America’s chief housing regulator would be familiar with this history.
I am guessing that the Power that Be want to keep voters happy and the system going as long as possible. The lenders are going to come up short, but that will be the case, pretty much everywhere.
What did Rubio say at the Munich security conference? Ignore my ears chin and nose and know we are all white Christians. Elect me in 2028.
From a transcript:
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/02/secretary-of-state-marco-rubio-at-the-munich-security-conference
We gather here today as members of a historic alliance, an alliance that saved and changed the world. When this conference began in 1963, it was in a nation – actually, it was on a continent – that was divided against itself. The line between communism and freedom ran through the heart of Germany. The first barbed fences of the Berlin Wall had gone up just two years prior. . .
At the time of that first gathering, Soviet communism was on the march. Thousands of years of Western civilization hung in the balance. At that time, victory was far from certain. . .
We increasingly outsourced our sovereignty to international institutions while many nations invested in massive welfare states at the cost of maintaining the ability to defend themselves. This, even as other countries have invested in the most rapid military buildup in all of human history and have not hesitated to use hard power to pursue their own interests. To appease a climate cult, we have imposed energy policies on ourselves that are impoverishing our people, even as our competitors exploit oil and coal and natural gas and anything else – not just to power their economies, but to use as leverage against our own.
And in a pursuit of a world without borders, we opened our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people. We made these mistakes together, and now, together, we owe it to our people to face those facts and to move forward, to rebuild.
Under President Trump, the United States of America will once again take on the task of renewal and restoration, driven by a vision of a future as proud, as sovereign, and as vital as our civilization’s past. And while we are prepared, if necessary, to do this alone, it is our preference and it is our hope to do this together with you, our friends here in Europe.
The headline on the WSJ article regarding this speech is
https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/u-s-and-europe-no-longer-kindred-souls-enter-a-marriage-of-convenience-d76008d6
U.S. and Europe, No Longer Kindred Souls, Enter a Marriage of Convenience
Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered a warmer tone at this year’s Munich Security Conference, but European officials say the trans-Atlantic fissure remains
Not sure there is much difference between US and EU. Spain and Hungary offer a small resistance to pax *udica. That will be put down soon.
Rubio needs to work on his voice. It is full of many weird lapses.
“..fissure remains..”
Yes, it was [ demonstrative – ostentatious] deliberative action as Rubio did NOT meet some of the key EU dignitaries there, but rather visited on the next leg Slovakia, which is a part of that soft-rebel anti-alliance, yet buying US hardware..
These strange cat fighting relationships – It’s like reading a hist book on any previous epoch..
Hm, so the SK was a warmup, next and most important stop Hungary, elections soon.. , so Rubio(Trump) ~campaigned for Orban there..
Context: HU-Orban already proven and is willing to use blocking-veto powers during EU decision-making again, which SK has not been so openly-brave to often undertake till now..
So, there is this loose dissenting coalition of HU, SK, AUT, CZ, (+PL sometimes..), .. possibly trying to attract further member states..
Rubio talks in a sadly familiar way, with everything and everyone being a threat.
He at least got the year correct, unfortunately everything else he said was a hideous distortion.
“For decades, the Munich Security Conference (MSC) – which opened today and runs till Sunday – was one of the few places where adversaries could meet without theatrics. Founded in 1963 as the Wehrkundetagung, it served as a discreet Cold War dialogue forum between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Even at moments of high tension, Soviet and later Russian representatives were present, and Munich allowed uncomfortable messages to be delivered directly rather than through press releases or military manoeuvres.”
https://thetransnational.substack.com/p/the-munich-security-conference-msc
Who can forget Putin’s 2007 speech, but we won’t be allowed to hear any opposing views anymore.
Alternatively, for an unusually honest opinion of what it has become, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi puts it in its true perspective.
https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/523839/Munich-Circus-Under-destruction
You are right. This is an excerpt from the Tehran Times article:
TEHRAN – What the Munich Security Conference (MSC) has become is nothing short of a “circus”. That’s the assessment from Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi regarding the annual event. He shared this blunt view on his X account, likely after witnessing the son of a deposed king—who fled the country with hundreds of millions in Iranian wealth almost five decades ago—being invited to the event to claim popular desire for his monarchical restoration.
Or perhaps Araghchi reached that conclusion after listening to an Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate advocating for American strikes against her own country and for intensified sanctions. Either way, he found it difficult to fathom how low the Europeans have stooped to please Israel.
“Sad to see the usually serious Munich Security Conference turned into the ‘Munich Circus’ when it comes to Iran,” Araghchi wrote. He attributed this decline to a preference for performance over substance, noting that it conveyed several crucial messages: primarily, that Europe has lost all relevance in West Asia; and secondarily, that Germany has actively ensured any remaining continental maneuvering room serves Israeli interests.
“Europe’s overall trajectory is dire, to say the least,” the top diplomat wrote.
I should add an excerpt of your other link, from the Transnational Substack.
‘Munich Circus’: Under destruction
Sidelined in Ukraine and ignored in West Asia, Europe sacrifices its diplomatic standing to appease Israel
TEHRAN – What the Munich Security Conference (MSC) has become is nothing short of a “circus”. That’s the assessment from Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi regarding the annual event. He shared this blunt view on his X account, likely after witnessing the son of a deposed king—who fled the country with hundreds of millions in Iranian wealth almost five decades ago—being invited to the event to claim popular desire for his monarchical restoration.
Or perhaps Araghchi reached that conclusion after listening to an Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate advocating for American strikes against her own country and for intensified sanctions. Either way, he found it difficult to fathom how low the Europeans have stooped to please Israel.
“Sad to see the usually serious Munich Security Conference turned into the ‘Munich Circus’ when it comes to Iran,” Araghchi wrote. He attributed this decline to a preference for performance over substance, noting that it conveyed several crucial messages: primarily, that Europe has lost all relevance in West Asia; and secondarily, that Germany has actively ensured any remaining continental maneuvering room serves Israeli interests.
“Europe’s overall trajectory is dire, to say the least,” the top diplomat wrote.
https://justdario.com/2026/02/mag7s-now-issuing-debt-to-continue-building-ai-is-a-loud-warning/
From the link:
In the past few days, something rather incredible happened: Amazon and Google, two “cash cows,” started to gear up to directly issue debt. When I read this headline, “Google to join exclusive 100 club with century-long bond,” I couldn’t hold back a smirk on my face while thinking, “This is it!”
What’s the matter with a century bond? While cash cows like Apple issuing debt can be justified when, cough cough, it is a good way to pay less taxes and continue buying back shares to inflate the stock price at the expense of undermining the resilience of the business in case of an economic downturn, issuing a century bond instead is a pretty strong signal that a “growth” company is turning into “value.” In a nutshell, the days of spectacular growth are over, as was always the case for every single company that issued century bonds before:
Later:
Let me ask a question here: how reliable is the profitability of an infrastructure whose components face fast depreciation and a quick path to obsolescence? Easy answer: not very reliable since, unless that infrastructure is massively profitable in a short period of time, it won’t be able to repay itself and allow the company to smoothly service its debt obligations. This is the exact mistake investors made a few months ago when they jumped headfirst to buy Oracle bonds, only to then quickly regret it, as I explained in “AI IS BECOMING ORACLE’S LITTLE BIGHORN.”
Later:
if a datacenter company’s business isn’t viable, how would that change if directly taken over by a larger company? Of course it won’t, which is the reason why Oracle is now in trouble. Would that change if the operations were directly and fully handled by the hyperscalers? Of course not, because the math doesn’t change, and what the math is screaming is that the revenues to be expected from AI will be a fraction of the projections presented so far.Asset-Based Lending
I want to conclude by representing this chart from 5 months ago:
https://justdario.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/image-13.png
Because the whole AI bubble has been inflated thanks to the largest circular financing scheme ever built, the ponzi scheme, oops sorry, I meant to say bubble, will remain in place till all participants are able to suck in more cash than the one that is being incinerated. Mag7 now issuing debt outright will allow this scheme to continue a little longer, but once even the lenders willing to hand over cash to them are exhausted, then there won’t be any way to keep this whole house of cards standing.
debt financed via refinancing will keep these companies from ever kicking the bucket once negative interest rates become the norm watch this space.
Interesting idea!
Let me thank you personally Mr. Sam Banque-di-tutti-Frauddi ..
Certainly these are interesting times if / when now ~100yrs bond_(r)age for IT-cloud sector is on arrival as well. In a way few noticed (were concerned) it was under natural progression already, say compare to a bit earlier wave of tech luminaries like that freq. re-operated tanned, database overlord they mentioned in the article as well..
Well, you apply the ever basic validity test and present pics of these ” fin wizardry moguls ” to your +80old grandma, should the reaction – output be ” .. yay, he looks like Freddie, the late circus owner in that park across the river ..” you know the score.
The only realistic problem is that it could drag on for another 1-2x decades more ( meaning under the EU -> US -> CHN general collapse vector progression ).
I was wondering if this article was even true. So I did a little searching. There are articles about Alphabet (parent of Google) having already issued 100-year bonds:
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/12/alphabet-100-year-bond-debt-fears-ai-credit-risk.html
Why Alphabet’s 100-year sterling bond is raising new fears over debt-fuelled AI arms race
The century bond — the Google-owner’s debut issuance in sterling — is part of a broader multi-tranche, multi-currency borrowing drive totaling some $20 billion. The offering spans maturities across dollars, euros and sterling, and includes a debut bond in Swiss francs.
Century bonds remain rare, and are more commonly associated with governments than corporate borrowers. Demand typically comes from large institutional investors such as pension funds and insurers seeking to match long-term liabilities. . . .
The 100-year bond attracted almost 10 times orders for the £1 billion ($1.37 billion) sale on Tuesday, with the coupon reaching 120 basis points above 10-year gilts, according to a report from Bloomberg, which cites anonymous sources.
More gems regarding AI from the internet.
“You can’t tell where the freed up resources will be deployed. No one in the 1920s could predict that the great grand children of the out-of-work farriers would become website designers.”
“AI will most certainly transform the economy and world. It’s just starting. It’s not really a debatable point. Every company will use it. Many of the commenters think their AI search tool is what AI is….It’s the very small part of it. Nearly every job will be automated and become far more productive. Software development is now 10x, call center work will be 5-10x now multiply that across the entire economy. People talk about open AI and it burning through 100 billion- Yep they might lose money, but Microsoft, Google and Amazon wont. This is good for the economy, money is being used to for capital projects and the cost profiles of nearly every business have gone down immeasurably. It will be the internet x 10.”
“Much of human thought is easy to replace: the “hallucinations” as it’s called with AI, that humans think up every day all day long, the BS they fabricate in their brains, their awful memory (limited, selective, and deceptive), their inability to learn much, their inability to think through complex problems and lots of data (they need computers to do that, lol), their inability to handle complex math (computers needed), etc., horrible erroneous decisions, etc. The list is long.
AI has long ago outperformed humans without computers. Humans with computers are a little harder to beat. Humans with AI might be harder to beat still, but then that’s already AI.”
There are lot of people discussing online whether A.I. will benefit most people or just the rich but no one is questioning whether A.I. actually exists. Can this software actually what it claims to do? I remember the claims about A.I. replacing human drivers in 2012. Never happened. I’m starting to see a pattern of U.S. companies offering products that don’t work as they are advertised and are shielded from anyone who might want to sue over this.
“Read the article again; especially the latter half. The money was sitting on the sidelines; now it’s going back out into the wider economy, at least for some time — and during that time, it may stimulate people to buy more goods.”
How does reducing the number of people employed, especially skilled workers, simulate people to buy more goods?
We are at the age of rapid trust breakdown. The destruction of trust is essential in order to not care for those at a distance from you. If you care too much, you are going to be in the worse emotional pain. Trusting those at a distance, will get you burned… every time.
It’s just awful that as a survival strategy in a lower energy, high AI society, it is important to not have too many friends. The only friends one will have will live within a one hour walking time. Most family will need to be as far far away as possible.
AI is the destroyer of trust. This means that bugs are features. It’s so ironic that this net-nasty tech came around just as net usable energy is dropping on a per-person basis.
Think local, or suffer more.
Doesn’t AI enable the work of thieves? Isn’t this a major thing we need to watch out for (in addition to “hallucinations”)?
Near the end of the year, someone forged checks on the bank account that my husband and I use. My husband and I are guessing that someone used AI to make a copy of a check I made out to a charity and put in a new recipient and much higher amount. Perhaps we are too suspicious about how AI could be used.
With respect to an audit that is being done, the instructions say that it is necessary to contact each bank the organization uses, and get each bank’s view of the bank balance as of the audit date. One of the people involved in the audit says it would be a lot easier just to get a copy of the statement provided by the bank, as of that date. But wouldn’t it be very easy to use AI to print out a different version of the statement, with a different bank balance?
In fact, for itemized deductions, it would seem easy for a taxpayer to fix receipts to show more than was paid for some deductible amount.
How can we believe anything, anymore?
If you can’t believe anything anymore, then that is exactly the moment trust for anything was destroyed. I see AI as being an incredible tool for destroying societal trust. It is a weapon, even if it was not intended to be.
It goes back to the Susan Blackmore’s Meme’s are incredibly destructive line. Each Meme, starting with the creation of DNA hundreds of millions of years back, often terminates all that was before it. It replaces everything.
On this blog, we have recently talked about how low level jobs removed from North America are next up to be terminated. We have talked about how creators, who managed to find a way to make a buck after loosing their jobs, will be next up.
Eventually any digital foot print will be a vector for an AI attack. Presumably, that just happened to you.
Before long, trust is gone, and nothing will be set to hold anything together anymore. Once communications break down for one reason or another, that’s a form of freedom, but also the advent of scarcity. For example, polymer notes being removed from circulation is a communications tool, and a means to build trust by. One gone, especially in rural settings, yet another means of communications is dead.
I see this moment in time as being the most important moment in our personal existences. Trust is not being factored in to the equation like it needs to be. It was always presumed by interpersonal communications right up until the internet really started taking hold. We managed to still have that with telephones, but its all being swept way as “we speak”.
Today, when I hear someone in a call centre with a Middle American accent, I wonder if it’s a real-time filter on the call. I have more time for people with a Middle American accent, because that the culture I used to trust…. because I was that culture. I understood it.
Now, I can only find trust when I am face to face with to someone… perhaps in a pub…. which are suspiciously all going out of business.
Interactions are all forms of communications. The are being annihilated for the sake of progress. The road to Hell is paved with both efficiency and good intentions.
You may have the cause and effect backwards.
A.I. may be the manifestation of low trust.
The justification for A.I. initially is that people are too inept to be trusted to do certain tasks, and that machines are more trustworthy.
trust is an abstract concept
you can’t apply an abstract concept to a machine….
a machine can only do what its human operator allows/tells it to do
You and I understand the logical fallacy of placing trust in a machine while saying humans are not trustworthy but important people in financial and “tech” circles don’t appear to.
A machine is only trustworthy as the people who made it and gave it instructions. Few people are making that connection outside of a national security context.
It might be that the people in charge see too much communication as a threat and want to sweep it away while stepping up surveillance and isolatio automation. A.I.
“Now, I can only find trust when I am face to face with to someone… perhaps in a pub…. which are suspiciously all going out of business.”
The following is conjecture but play along.
Pubs or bars are a low margin business unless exorbitant prices are charged to customers. Also, alcohol consumption may linked in the public’s mind with violence and rape so more people now avoid public drinking. I’d say that now a substantial number of people walking in public areas who appear drunk are psychologically troubled. Troubled people scare away normal people. Bar owners, seeing heavy drinkers as trouble have pivoted towards safer clientele who will pay more if that means keeping the troubled people away. This of course, means less alcohol or no alcohol.
Throughout history, Europe led science, and USA, for the lack of better choices, concentrated in technology, which is nothing more than glorified blacksmithing.
I believe USA was the first to award doctorate in engineering. Ironically it was awarded to J. Willard Gibbs, who came up with the laws of thermodynamics which basically disproves whatever wild claims the delusional cornucopians might have. Engineering was not considered to be a serious discipline in the Continent prior to 1918.
The famous Solvay Conference in 1927
https://youtu.be/8GZdZUouzBY?si=hB_Jj03bpwbcpZph
featured zero figures from the continent of Asia, and two from North America, both second-generation Americans (i.e. their parents came from Europe and they were taught in the European way, not the American way).
Zero zombies and zero from peoples who contributed nothing into civilization.
Unfortunately, the Great War and the 2nd World War basically terminated the European stock which produced such talents, a gap the likes of Dr. Robert Firth, descended from forest rangers(i.e. rent-a-cop) in the midlands proved to be completely unable to fill.
Instead of such talents, this zombie won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2014, for inventing the blue LED light, a technician’s job.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd0oCwGhIhI
I still laugh on the people who claim Rosalind Franklin should have been awarded the Nobel Prize. She took good photographs, that was all. If taking good photos qualifies someone for the Nobel Prize there would have been no shortage of photographers who took better photos than her.
Basically the emphasis on ‘applied physics’, i.e. overclocked ai running around, is like handling the keys for Civilization to zombies, who will do zombie things.
Zombies crowded out STEM in most western countries, and we all know where the world is being headed.
I think the big issue has been universities wanting to keep their enrollments up, and faculty members wanting students to give them good ratings. Grade inflation has been rampant.
The push has been for very light degrees, certainly not in STEM classes. Anything a “take all comers” admission can easily do, without a whole lot of homework.
“technology, which is nothing more than glorified blacksmithing.”
Technology is much more than glorified blacksmithing. It is scientific theory put into practice. Whether it is the invention and first production of the transistor, or reducing quantum mechanical devices to practical components, it is applied science. THe US exceled in this category and also led later physics and chemistry.
Is Mr. Ross correct? Is advertising a complete waste of money?
Ross
Feb 9, 2026 at 4:00 pm
“I wonder if AI will be able to convince firms that 90% of advertising dollars spent is a complete waste of $$$. Tesla does ZERO advertising. Apple has mostly stopped advertising. But no marketing VP is ever going to admit to the CEO, “The hundreds of millions of $$$ we spend every year on ads is not contributing anything to our revenue.”
Whatever Elon Musk does is advertisement. I think Ross is confusing that advertising has evolved but not in the forms Ross recognizes.
Yes, coming from the corporate world myself.
But it’s complex, you see, Ads indeed worked in the past. When they first appeared and until the 50s, it was actually considered an intellectual interest to read Ads, to be “aware” of new products, to expand one’s knowledge, to make informed purcharses, etc. I’m not saying Ads were well intentioned, but that they were seen in a good light.
Things changed in the 60s to the 2010s, as Ads became much more about promoting a “brand”, a “style”, instead of a singular product. This is considered the golden age of Ads, with iconic imagery, style and “cultural power”.
Thing is… Today, ever since the smartphone revolution… Ads reverted to be purely to showcase the product and price, and often without any other substance. This is a reversal to a primitive form of Ad way before the modern age, like Catalogues of the pre-War era, but without people buying them, instead they are shoved into the consumer’s face in places where they don’t want to see any of that, they became visual polution in webpages and apps.
TV Ads are dead, no one watches TV, the “cultural” Ad died along with it and its national broadcast monoculture, people are too fragmented for that. Mobile Ads are annoying and visual polution. Outdoors, Radio, etc are dead too. People have become saturated and they can’t stand them anymore.
So, yes, Ads are dead, they are a massive money sink and today I can only assume that they are top-down investor guidelines for companies to subsidize other companies. They are patronages to companies which don’t generate revenue, but are in the interest of continuing existing, such as newspapers or social networks.
What replaced Ads, by the way? Well, when someone wants to buy something and is unsure, they will seek reviews, be it on Youtube content creators or with Instagram/TikTok digital influencers. That’s what it has become.
Social media and its direct predecessor “reality tv” are giant ads. Many influencers use their authenticity to promote products. Without some form of patronage, a lot of “art” or entertainment would not exist.
I agree. Ads are very much annoying. I pay little attention to them. But Ads are a major use for AI. How is AI to justify its existence without a product like “speeding up advertising production?”
>> “The pessimists want you to believe we’re running out of everything. They’re wrong. We’re on the verge of solving problems that have plagued humanity since the beginning – if we choose to build instead of cower.” –
Garry Tan
CEO of Y-Combinator (the most known tech incubator) summarizing the views of Dennis Hassabis, CEO of Deep Mind
I stopped reading at “Tan”
Another zombiefied striver with an artificially inflated IQ
They, and you can put Elon Musk here as well, are betting that AI will finally solve physics, for then to happen a new engineering revolution – new and better technology will make everything cheap beyond measure. Richard Friedland also has a technological solution today that promises a lot too.
So, what is “solving physics”?
Anyone in the field know that, since the earliest 20th century, hell, even late 19th century, Physics took a wrong turn, with wrong theories and wrong math. The whole of 20th and 21st centuries has been a massive uphill battle trying to fix this, to conciliate it with reality – without any success.
The reality of the physics field today is one of complete stop, no existing theories solve anything, or even work, and physicists are helpless, still clinging to old ideas, trying to work on them, with them. It’s a field that has seen its dead end. Many phenomena today are without explanations, chemistry is also being done empirically because theory can’t keep up.
There are some interesting outsiders in this, my two favorites are Bill Gaede https://youtube.com/user/bgaede and Miles Mathis https://milesmathis.com/. Some people know the people from the Thunderbolts Project or SpaceWeatherNews, but they rely more on just criticising without providing any substance or math or theory, making their usefulness questionable at best.
But I don’t know, really, if AI “fix/solves” physics, if there will be any time left remaning.
Is Y Combinator the same company that hosts this site?
news.ycombinator.com
“hacker news”?
This seems counter-intuitive but I wouldn’t take advice from a bunch of computer programmers who have no idea how anything works outside of I.T.
They sit in ivory towers just as high as the finance people.
In fact they might be pulling triple duty these days and may be writing all the “science” articles on the internet and in those “science” magazines because no one who has a basic understanding of batteries would write something like this.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2515069-old-ev-batteries-could-meet-most-of-chinas-energy-storage-needs/
I guess they maintain the site? But it’s just a discussion board, I wouldn’t read to much into the fact someone posted a dumb article there; anyone can post, I think.
Many people still want to war, pillage, and kill. What will deep mind do about that?
Convince them to invest in DeepMind?
Is there any other way to make a buck in AI?
Another victim of AI . Trial runs on YT of AI Videos is good . Goodbye Hollywood ;Bollywood , Tollywood and Kollywood .
https://www.zerohedge.com/ai/billion-dollar-movie-one-prompt-ai-disruption-crosshairs-hone-hollywood-studios
What is tollywood?
Heat or Eat
The Cost of Power: ABC57 digs into rising utility bills causing regional outrage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u_MtaTTgPA
Seems new Data Centers are putting a hurting on the residential customer base…
It’s a club and you’re not in it…
Well, those who have to choose are probably not worth saving to begin with
Raising electricity production is a long-term and expensive operation. In the US (and Europe), electricity production hasn’t generally been rising for a long time. Now, the amazingly high demand of AI data centers is causing a big problem. Even if the AI organization builds a plant for burning AI, it doesn’t actually provide the natural gas to operate the plant. (In the US, much of the natural gas is being sent to Europe as LNG, to try to balance out their intermittent wind and solar electricity production.)
Canadian Olympic Collapse.
No……Gold…….Order
ECB boosting liquidity in volatile – troubled times (by 3/4@26):
aka instability ahead..
—
ECB enhances repo facility for central banks
(14 February 2026)
More effective and flexible euro liquidity provision to support smooth transmission of euro area monetary policy
Updated facility to provide standing access for broad set of central banks against high-quality euro-denominated collateral
Changes to apply as of third quarter of 2026
—
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2026/html/ecb.pr260214~076e09a6cc.en.html
In the US, the Reverse Repo data doesn’t seem to show much more usage.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RRPONTSYD/
But I thought I heard something similar about US limits now being higher also, as if in anticipation of a big problem occurring.
This is disturbing but it just seems to be an extension of what has been happening recently elsewhere. The speaker talks about being laid-off as an engineer at American Express, and a large share of work being transferred to India. This is not being disclosed publicly. What is being called layoffs because of AI could mostly be layoffs because of moving work to low-wage countries.
https://youtu.be/t5fXrPMGM5E
Was a Director at Amex When They Started Replacing Us With $30K Workers
You Tube Blurb says:
American Express just opened a 1,000,000 sq ft office in Gurugram, India, the largest in its corporate history. I was an engineering director inside the organization behind their so-called “AI-powered innovation.” My teams built the lending and buy-now-pay-later web apps you use every day. Here’s what I saw: a systematic effort to replace American tech workers with offshore and H-1B employees, a resource allocation scheme designed to set domestic workers up for failure, and an executive leadership chain that made its preferences explicit to my face.
I was blocked from a VP’s LinkedIn page after calling out the reality behind a press release. So instead of a comment, you get this video.
This is not just American Express. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Big Tech are all running the same playbook. If you work in tech, this affects you.
Bullshit . IT workers are now the number two in suicides after farmers . Massive layoffs . In 2025 the top IT companies created just 17 SEVENTEEN jobs .
https://restofworld.org/2026/india-tech-workers-crisis-suicide/
Interesting point.
But I notice a lot of stories about the American Express Office in India.
https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/careers/locations/gurgaon/index.html/
https://www.hindustantimes.com/trending/worlds-largest-american-express-office-is-in-gurgaon-indian-techie-gives-full-tour-101726466598151.html
World’s largest American Express office is in Gurgaon. Indian techie gives full tour
This article is from 2024, so I would expect it to be up to staffing levels by now, I would think.
Maybe there is a different time frame involved than we think.
17 NET jobs creation.
Yes . Confirm .
I read a related article somewhere very recently. It said that all these jobs are precisely where AI will thrive at the first level.
So, India Tech will be eviscerated by AI … when it gets just a little bit better. I have to say, my experience with India HR assistance…. has been passable, but not stellar. Having a non-accented voice might actually make things a little easier to adopt.
Would cutting the HR related tech workforce have an affect on India?
I think AI is already more than good enough to replace developers that do shoddy work or don’t care or have insufficient training and experience. If you don’t care about ugly code or maintainability, it’s fine. For HTML/CSS it can probably replace near-everyone already.
I gave this a bit of thought.
We see videos being produced that can include our visual and vocal likenesses. If we use those to promote our services or products, then nuance is not needed.
Everyone will soon presume that everything they see…. is AI augmented or generated. Why put any effort into a cheezy set or back ground, when your avatar can be on the top of Everest explaining how to stay warm even in the most demanding of situations.
The point here is, everything is being rebuilt for sit on your couch consumption right at this moment. There will be no need for so much of what we have had. That’s being swept away. Video generation will be the only AI revenue generator. Everything else AI will snap into that version of reality.
I absolutely believe that no one buys as much as is required for a creator on YouTube or anywhere like that, to make a buck through. Advertising just doesn’t make sense without disposable income. That’s gone.
Yet somehow, money is getting into the system and to creators in a similar manner to the way banks loan money into existence by. I have to wonder if the currency now is really data which is used to leverage money to pay creators off by.
If that is the case, then having everyone generate their own AI existence might just simply be an economic force of nature. The next step, and that’s that. None of this makes sense to me, but someone certainly believes this is going to help kill off a lot of people… otherwise it would be regulated like a deadly poison.
In summary, yup… I think you are right, but the need for programming with code is no longer even a requirement. We now have a work around for that. AI is far darker than I could have imagined a few weeks back.
>> money is getting into the system and to [content] creators
Speculating … content creators often get partnerships from platforms and sponsors. Digital platform-creator deals are a new phenomenon outside of the traditional advertising model. Take for example Rumble, which wants streamers to get viewers to bring not just higher revenue, but higher market penetration and stock price. So, finance capital is funding content creators.
One question that arises is: is this simply organic incentive-driven behavior, or is it driven by actors who think in terms of herding humanity via media and messaging? To what degree this is coordinated and specifically by whom, I don’t know …
>> the need for programming with code is no longer even a requirement
A human programmer is still useful in many contexts, if only for providing direction. Of course I don’t know how long that will last – maybe autonomy improves substantially.
I think things like video creation are a different realm: it has no requirements for determinism or sensory-motor response timing or software scope beyond moving pixels. That may be sufficient to dominate media, but autonomous AI for science, engineering, manufacturing, agriculture will require further refinement.
They should have seen it when Trump put someone married to a person from India, a partner in the law firm founded by Charlie Munger (Warren Buffett’s sidekick), as his VP.
Cost reduction process. Of course the world will look like Calcutta, but even in the old days the maharajas lived quite well.
I was briefly in India in 2016. There was no running water, in a town outside of Mumbai. I saw women carrying pots of water on their heads, for use later in the day in their homes.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-admin/upload.php?item=41443
I saw women washing clothes in a pond.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/women-washing-clothes.jpg
This is a group of men, working on fixing a road.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/men-repairing-road.jpg
The woman who swept the area outside the room I stayed in had a broom made of twigs. IIRC, she was barefoot.
When I look at India from the prism of Dimitry Orlov ‘s ” Five stages of collapse ” . It has already collapsed . Let us see the parameters as per Dimitry :
1 . Financial collapse ; Massive closures of the small and medium industries . Increase in private debt .
2 . Economic collapse : All banking sector is bankrupt , govt gives economic data which the IMF and WB reject , massive reverse migration from cities to the villages . 800 million living on free rations .
3 . Political collapse : The rightest BJP has cornered the Hindu vote bank in the most populated ( not prosperous) of the Hindu heartland . It has now revised the voter lists to delete minorities and assure itself a victory .
4 . Social collapse : All social institutions have collapsed , law and order , police , judiciary , education , health care , human rights , stock exchange , etc . Might is right and law of the jungle prevails . Even the armed forces have now become a tool of the govt .
5 . Cultural collapse : The rightest BJP has sowed the seeds for a cultural collapse — Hindu vs Muslim , high caste hindus vs low cast hindus , hindi speaking vs non hindi speaking , liberals vs ultra conservatives etc .
So now you will ask why is there no revolution ? My viewpoint :
1 . Indians are religious . Majority believe in destiny and reincarnation . They believe that poverty is there destiny and they are suffering the results of sins they may have committed in their previous lives . Acceptance .
2 . Just not enough calories to be on the street on an empty stomach and when all your time is looking to how to get a job and thinking where the next meal will come from .
Real time reporting .
Is the situation in India notably deteriorated? It’s my sense that you’re usually quite down on India and its leadership, so it’s hard for me to gauge whether this is a real change or just your usual pessimism and venting.
Ivan , I am not venting just reporting facts and repeating facts I have enumerated several times before . The economic and financial facts are availble on the net but the political , social and cultural facts can only come from me who is fully vested with the history , social and cultural aspects of the Indian society .
OK, forgive the term “venting”, I was just asking whether things are actually *worse* vs just the customary bad.
That’s not collapse.
If India had collapsed, there would be no government and the death rate would be much higher. In other words, India’s population would be shrinking.
Guest , we don’t know the real population of India . The last census was held in 2010 and was due in 2020 . It was postponed because of Covid . After that every year a promise is made but nothing is done . Based on the political situation the govt will delay this until after the general election in 2029 . So look forward to 2030 . This in itself a sign of political/social collapse .
Thanks Ravi.
Now ~20yr delayed census in India seems as important marker..
Well , Nauru was once the richest nation on the planet . Human beings have a short memory .
https://medium.com/@financefusionhub/the-rise-and-fall-of-nauru-a-cautionary-tale-of-economic-mismanagement-bba7f7d0d06e
This AI bot is everywhere, esecially on dozens of copycats of OG John AG’s You Tube channel, itself AI generated.
Nevertheless, this link is the best summary of understanding the difference between a functioning currency and a functioning logistics system. IC vs the Amish. My previous comments were encapsulated in the analogy of burning the candle at both ends. One end is the debt based fractional reserve system and the other end is the physics based system of ECoE, availability of raw materials, water, food, and laws of nature.
I really liked the analogy of the seige of Leningrad @ 6:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coYpziPKLfg
Stay normacy biased my friends.
Yeah these AI channels are emerging as the best content on yootoob so long as we remain vigilant regarding the mainstream assumptions built into a lot of them. The prime one of course being that collapse isn’t structural. Therein the Hand’s collapse cooptation lies.
The moneyoverhistory AI channel, I think it is, has been good for the Iran issue. I have a feeling Iran is going to strike first. Hope so as that would be fun
This is a very good video. It explains some of the issue better than I could before seeing it. I expect Dennis L. would like this video.
few recognise what ai is…..
ai cannot ”do” work, only assist ”us” to do work….
but work is what provides real wages, and wages are what we use to buy the results of other people work….–who themselves earn real wages through real work doing real jobs
if ai cuts out a huge swathe of ”work” in the name of efficiency, then there will be far less wages to buy the goods produced by the ai-assisted people who are actually work-employed.
when i started pencil-to-paper work 70 years ago. the thought of my work being automated seemed ridiculous—but it happened,—i was lucky to keep one jump ahead down the years.
i dont think that would be possible now…..
Globalist AMEX is under serious pressure from stablecoins which are structurally more competitive than credit cards. AMEX is a dinosaur. It’s now offering a cryptocurrency rewards system lol. The humiliation. It’s also on the SWIFT network which is another dinosaur and nemesis of the political ‘dedollarization’ movement. It can run to India but it can’t hide.
IBM started out sourcing engineering jobs to India more than 30 years ago.
Agere spin off of Lucent Technologies was out sourcing engineering to Mexico 25 years ago.
2+2=4 if you are paid 120,000 dollars per year
2+2=4 if you are paid 30,000 dollars per year
every job is going ai even india people are no longer required for most jobs
“What is being called layoffs because of AI could mostly be layoffs because of moving work to low-wage countries.”
A.I.=actually India
LOL!
The Elite live by different rules than the rest of us.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/unsettling-truths-epstein-files-reveal-about-power-and-privilege
This echoes the point Christopher Lasch made decades ago, long before private islands and hedge-fund philanthropy became familiar symbols of elite excess. In his 1994 book “The Revolt of the Elites,” Lasch argued that the modern American ruling classes had stopped seeing themselves as stewards of a shared national project. Instead, they increasingly saw themselves as a mobile, globalized caste, educated in the same institutions, moving through the same cities, governed by the same tastes, and primarily accountable only to each other. Citizenship was seen as a minor inconvenience. Nationhood and patriotism were just sentimental relics from less enlightened times. . .
If the Epstein affair provokes lasting anger, it is because it crystallizes a truth many citizens already sense, that the people shaping the future live in a world apart, governed by different rules, and increasingly incapable of moral seriousness. No society can long endure that division without consequence.
The question is not whether further revelations will emerge. It is whether the public will finally insist that elites once again live under the same moral and civic conditions as those they presume to lead.
Lasch was just rehashing the idea Ayn Rand put in Atlas Shrugged, adapted to the realities of 1990s. When Rand wrote that book international air travel was not that prevalent so the elites could not move around as fast as they do now. Even the highest of the elites were dependent upon lowly sailors and train conductors if they had to move far away.
Now, a lot of elites can pilot their own crafts, such as the daughter of Mr. Maxwell, and measures are being taken to make a flight completely automatic without the need for pilots who do make mistakes.
The elites are fed up of having to support the society.
An alternative view is that engineers and laborers hold up society, while so-called elites are largely parasitic and simply good at finding ways to intermediate financial flows. One class is fully busy making everything, which leaves them vulnerable to rule by the other class that spends all its mental energy concocting rules, mechanisms, and systems to entrench its own money, power, and influence.
I hear you on the pilotage angle..
But lets remain realistic here, on the ground service hours ( necessary ) going into private jets are massive ( be it rather preventive mostly ) and on regular schedules – hence you ALWAYs depend on [ people ], albeit specialists..
It is the labor of the proletariat that gives the money of the bourgeoisie its value. Does a master support his slaves or his slaves support him?
The masters breed the slaves in order that the slaves are grateful to be alive and serve the masters. The slaves would never have been born without the master feeding the breeding stock. Welcome to the People Farm.
Reante tells us that stable coin will save the world (or something close to it) but the total dollar value of US stablecoins stopped growing until about 4 months ago. In fact, the amount is now down a bit. A chart shows that the total value built until early 2022. After a short plateau, the total value fell until about October 2023. The total value rose until October 2025, before its current plateau.
Bitcoins can be a way of ramping up demand for US Treasuries, if they grow in quantity. To do this, they would likely have to be used in many countries around the world.
The WSJ has an article:
https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/a-winter-for-stablecoins-would-signal-crypto-deep-freeze-34926ffa
A Winter for Stablecoins Would Signal Crypto Deep Freeze
Stablecoins are the entry ramp to the cryptoverse’s wider ambitions
Bitcoin’s price drop has certainly put a chill on the market for crypto companies. But as the digital-asset realm evolves, the real deep freeze would be if there were an extended drop in the value of stablecoins in circulation.
Stablecoins aren’t designed for speculation. Their price is meant to be fixed to a fiat currency, typically the U.S. dollar. That shouldn’t rise or fall with demand or sentiment.
But stablecoins can be created or redeemed, depending on how much demand there is to hold them. If they are overall shrinking, that could be a sign investors are souring on not only bitcoin but perhaps also the broader digital-asset ecosystem.
The total market value of the seven largest U.S. dollar stablecoins currently tracked by CoinGecko has declined almost 2% from its peak in December. That isn’t a huge drop. But it follows a steady surge in stablecoin value over the past year, helped by passage of the Genius Act, which is aimed at regulating these coins in the U.S.
I can not fathom anyone buying and holding stable coins. Crypto was always a Ponzi scheme which works on the expectation of growth. There is no growth in something worth 1 dollar. It is something whose sole function is to move money outside the banking system, quickly and anonymously. I think the current supply of stable coins is adequate. I understand that the USA might want to try to collapse it because it can not control it.
If you cannot fathom why someone in VZ or or Turkey or Nigeria would want to transact in stablecoin drb then that could only mean one of three things: either you’re an elitist who has no care and concern for people below your standing, or two, you’re so blinded by your political hate for the West that anything dollar equals ‘because Hitler’ or should I now say ‘because Epstein’ — even though I assume a real businessman like you always holds cash dollars in your pocket wallet as my dad always did — or three, you’re still ignorant as to what they are and how they integrate into the true systems theory of collapse even though that doesn’t stop you from having an opinion on them
You are awfully pushy Reante. Tone down your rhetoric.
Nobody like hypocrisy Gail. Therefore pointing it out is in the common interest.
Electricity is not very stable in VZ or Nigeria. Turkey, probably it is better, especially in Istanbul, but maybe not to the East. Stablecoin depends on electricity. I can see a very good reason not to hold on to Stablecoins.
People don’t need to buy and sell goods and services like they’re New Jersey high frequency trading servers with their own behind-the-meter gas turbine generators.They just need a transaction or two or three, and hopefully every day. The world is already 99% digital. Stablecoins increase accessibility and affordability. They also financially stabilize high inflation countries so that those countries can afford more duct tape for their duct taped electrical grids. Those are net improvements for civilizational Collapse preparedness regardless of how things end up playing out.
I guess you have a point. One of my iranian friends, at least one, holds stable coins. but given choices, and where the real money is, it is not done. so I think as re-dollarization plan this can not work. I do not see trillions coming from VZ or Nigeria.
Thanks. It’s not a currency for BAU. It’s a currency for post-collapse wherein there are few choices and no more real money to be made anyway because profiteering will only hasten further collapse, so it was be outlawed. The collapse and acceleration of entropy (the Olduvai slide) will already have functionally outlawed it.
Stablecoin function is not redollarization in any growth-phase imperially hegemonic sense. That’s over with. It is a classic defensive M&A function in order to stave off Collapse. There is no East vs West, that’s theater for facilitating the Inverted Perestroika.
AI:
“M&A acts as a crucial lifeline for companies facing impending collapse, offering a way to stabilize finances through strategic mergers, asset sales, or, in extreme cases, Chapter 11, where bankruptcy sales can preserve going-concern value. These transactions aim to secure liquidity, reduce costs, and consolidate market share to avoid liquidation, despite high risks of failure due to financial misalignment.
Key Aspects of Defensive M&A:
Strategic Rationale: Primarily used to combat high debt, liquidity issues, and the need for immediate cost reductions, allowing struggling companies to find a stronger partner.”
When we boil reality down to a lovely reduction of nested fractals that our gourmand, the returnique, would be proud to serve to his guests, of course the Non-Public Degrowth Agenda restructuring is nothing more than a tried and true corporate restructuring because what else is there? You chase value wherever you can. There’s value in decentralization (de globalization), and nested within that is the nuance that there’s value in centralizing the most powerful nation’s cutting edge financial decentralization away from the private central banking system in order to chase that value in the name of MPP, which is what stablecoins do.
Although I don’t agree, your post here is very well argued. Additionally, I hope you acknowledge the specific time factor boundary (exclusive) when it must / should / could occur.
PS thanks for inserting the ~returnique~ cameo but frankly I’m that type of gourmand never inviting any guests ( w. the exception of OFW )..
Thanks Jr
yes reante say sorry youre being mean
“mean”
I would use another word beginning with “s” and ending with “d”.
That boy needs to get out of here with his “a.i” money. The internet is not not going to survive any global collapse situation. Money will only have regional value. Only valuable physical goods will have any international value. Stablecoins will be worse than worthless. They won’t exist.
Strawman argument. AI has nothing to do with it. And it’s a controlled collapse, or that’s the plan anyway.
Regional money doesn’t exist anymore so you have to come up with a reasonable scenario as to how those are going to miraculously appear during the uncontrolled collapse that you are expecting. I bet you can’t do it and I don’t expect you’ll even try.
On regional money.
Well, speaking of the EUR realm, there were leaks about several member states still holding (hoarding) the previously issued legacy national cash and print matrices several yrs after the emergence of common currency. It’s meant as last ditch safety precaution in deep ~fin / geopolit-war collapse scenarios.
Obviously, the overall non existent regional money is valid in other world areas and context, say US, RU, CHN, India, Brazil etc.
Although lets be realistic, in ~milder collapse scenarios, meta-regions such as say +Texas realm, surely posses a pool of motivated and skilled people able to organize fresh new currency print even under the stress and chaos of such a crisis or at least not that long time ago. Perhaps way impossible nowish and into the 2030-40s perspective though..
That Texan scenario is not realistic. Firstly, a floor under industrial collapse has to be found and maintained in order for the most fundamental condition for a new independent currency to be established. Then there has to be the very high probability of growth proceeding because money is debt -based (future-based), otherwise there will be no lending from the surplus asset base that represents the stable floor. How is that super complex industrial regional growth going to happen without a regional industrial supply chain and a super complex state apparatus, and when the infinitely mightier global civilization that preceded it just finished wringing what blood it could from that same shale stone?
And how would there be a surplus asset base — a floor — to begin with when all survival of preceding collapse dynamics hinges on cannibalizing remaining surpluses?
reante> I did file the ~Texan+ case under ~milder (for us total doomers) collapse scenario on purpose.
For one thing, and in general for other scenarios the legacy infrastructure around us is still massive (look around), usually grid is to be started a new from “hard sources” such as hydro or coal plants etc..
In similar fashion there are regional setting more prone to very deep sudden collapse (say EU) with renewables and phased out coal..
But there are other “wiser” regions in play.
Hence I’d expect for the immediate next 2-3x decades more likelyhood of partial or fluid instability a mild or partial collapse sequencing ~only.
From that derives the rest.
Chiefly, the slightly optimistic outlook of the major players per given area – region. And these will likely include wide gamut of actionable cadre of very diverse peoplez background: ex gov, ex mil, ex crime, ex maverick biz, ex ..
In, summary when expecting ~stair case collapse sequence, the plateau-floors would allow for gathering capital of many sorts incl. also (quasi-)fin. backing.
Yes, correct in case of very sharp and deep collapse sequence your arguments take the lead. I guess (arguments above) still some energy leverage around, we are not there say before ~2050-70..
I know you did JR and appreciate it. I just don’t entertain what I see as unrealistic hypotheticals.
This civilizational is falling from an unimaginable height and I don’t see steps being an option unless it’s one, huge well-planned preventative leap down onto the Olduvai Slide (Phase 2 of the DA) which, if I redrew the illustration, the Slide would have a good-sized sheer cliff between it and the Slope, with the cliff being the consequences of the BNS. And the Slide would also be accompanied by blackouts like the Blackouts Cliff.
https://jayhansonsdieoff.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/figure-4.jpg
The life of human-iods is full of almost [ deus ex machina ] surprising twists..
For example, I recall about average ” nobody / common people ” guy who mostly from sheer luck scored in said multiples of [ scalings ] – the utmost dream of every high roller speculative investor. Basically, without inner knowledge just from msm halo and personal intuition bet on early initiation phase of crypto growth, then switched quickly horses to tech stock rise. So, in total it was sequence upon sequence of several thousands% in assets appreciation from modest primary seeding investment. Soon afterwards that 2019/20 thing his health deteriorated, diseased. I guess even his immediate family did not profit, lately it went to more distant relatives..
Now, I’m looking at the above as a single sample, from variety of other many possible outcomes, occurring during said period. Hence [ no stability ] of this realm to be had in the end.
Nice trash talk Gail. I like it.
A WAG of an 80% drop in global GDP for Phase 2 doesn’t meet the definition of stablecoins saving the world because that drop is TEOTWAWKI. That’s hundreds of millions if not billions of dead people.
Regarding the plateaued volumes: I think drb would rather see a hockey stick so that he can feel confident that it’s just a crypto bubble. But as it is drb will be using stablecoins within a year or two because drb’s a striver.
Obviously the 2025 Trumpian dollar race to the bottom currency weakening has put a damper on non-necessary stablecoins transactions. To say nothing of the close cousin safe haven the gold bubble. But the global infrastructure marches on.
We also need to remember that every time a stablecoin is redeemed it is destroyed. As it should be, rather than fractionally reserved into a credit bubble. Because even if the technology platform is in private hands for now — which merely constitutes the sneaking of it in through the Treasury’s back door — structurally it is fundamentally a sound public banking currency that every anti- globalist should by definition be preferring to, for example, the imperial Ruble, rather than harboring an implicit and misguided prejudice against it.
The Hand is trying to do everyone a solid here, including itself.
I have been using stable coins for 4 years now. but never held them more than a day.
You’re using them then out of transactional convenience and cost savings rather than necessity like folks in collapsing economies. Unless Russia ends up adopting USD stablecoins as its formal national currency or informally allows them as a de facto parallel currency, you’ll be using them out of necessity at some point unless there’s a hard decoupling of East and West which is not my expectation because industrial civilization cannot survive a hard decoupling for any period of time.
On the hard decoupling scenario, tend to agree.
Laymen peoplez are confused as the dissecting of the world into properly defined zones / spheres of influence [ for the future ] still not being finished at the moment.
quite the contrary, you use them if there is a hard decoupling, which, as seen by expats here, has already happened in 2022. No one has yet found a solution against cold wallets behind VPNs and other things which I can not describe.
In fact, whereas they have been used for many transactions in the past, in the future they will be used for portfolio re-balancing (an elegant way to say “money laundering”). Funds will be frozen in place at some point, individuals can only choose how much to allocate to each bank account and country.
Obviously, resource rich countries will keep their promises longer than resource insufficient countries like the US and much longer than resource poor places like Europe. The US is probably not in the top 30 when it comes to destinations for real money. I understand that this move staves off collapse, but the funds that can be extracted out of Iran, VZ or Nigeria are probably below or at 10 billions total. That is a really small amount compared to the tens of trillions the US needs.
They better hurry up with the big nasty because nothing is working for them. eastern and southern europe are growing restless, they lost much control of africa, and eurasia is openly thumbing their nose.
In a hard decoupling by my definition, you wouldn’t be a member of this commentariat.
Stablecoins aren’t about extraction. They’re about mutual aid.
Stablecoin usage will expand to institutional activities like commodities trading. Imports and exports. US debt requirements after the big nasty will be less than they are now. And the Fed can progressively commit seppuku by eliminating the interest payments burden on the Treasury with swaps and open market operations to remove the long bonds with higher interest rates from portfolios in exchange for t-bills.
They are hurrying up with the big nasty. Look at the rushed mobilizations. We’re in the ‘Is today the day?’ timeframe.
Well, perhaps we need more precise definition for [ hard decoupling ] as in its boundaries, applications etc.. for our age and immediate future prospects..
Given, grand-historical references, near total decouplings for sure existed, chiefly when great and distant empires collided, so I expect some form of renewal to such giga historical trend as well.
Obviously, in our import/export tech age “spices” (minerals, energy) must continue to flow, otherwise it’s synchro hard collapse over night.
I’d say at the moment we are into basic [ buffers ] big time again, aka stockpiled essentials for say at least few months, so the assembly lines for mil-defense and energy hitech could be running uninterrupted or at least run in necessary time slot batches as needed to replenish that desired gear..
Obviously, at some further (collapse) stage this won’t work smoothly anymore, that’s probably what reante meant above in a sub scenario talk.
Not there yet ( ~2035 onwards? )..
Elon’s going to build a thousand Starships a year in Texas and another thousand a year in Florida. That’s a lot of Starships. I wonder if he’s planning to run them on cooking oil.
https://x.com/MarsUniversityX/status/2021720984512831594
That’s going to take a lot of cooking oil.
https://x.com/i/status/2022128648916996179
Perhaps the Space Solar folks can use these to put solar panels somewhere in space. But otherwise, what use is there for all of these Starships? Give rides to rich people?
To show to the world how NOT to build a space program. We have seen no new achievements with this particular solution. It doesn’t work, it probably can’t be dramatically improved, and serves no purpose if it’s not about human space travel.
Humans in deep space is currently a total fantasy, and most people don’t understand why. Everyone really wants to believe space is like an ocean, but it is more a lifeless, inhospitable nearly endless void… and we weren’t made for being on it.
That leaves us with robot exploration, which is reasonable, and already fully addressable with the plethora of systems currently in use.
I can’t imagine what people are expecting of this thing. I know it’s not intended to be disappointment.
Well, the [ rocketry boyz ] evidently planning some sort of step by step approach to get desired/-able perma sites on the Moon, Mars and our orbit.
Clearly, to that effect ( freq. cargo launches ) and planned vector the re-usable rocketry works as intended.
In terms of practicality, beyond psycho-personal ( vanity ), perhaps surprisingly new additional value ( no guarantees ) could be head there, especially in new material science. Perhaps new alloys could be head “easily” in different gravitational enviro, and these brought back to earth, e.g. as part of future reactors, say for tiny inner cladding etc.
But your note about cosmos NOT to be taken merely as yet another sea voyage route ( easy playground ) is interesting and worth to dissect more.
Kessler effect laughs last.
It will start with a Solar Storm giggle, leading to Cyber outage chuckle.
These stupid AI videos… showing a bunch of non-existent audience members listening to a non-existent presenter resembling a guy who is nearly the perfect AI character. Who watches this stuff? Why? Whats the point?
Pingback: Entender la desglobalización: el papel del diésel y el combustible para aviones – la curva de mar
Diesel or natural gas are often used to power oil drilling — and, I suppose, more drilling, per volume of oil recovered, is required for short-well-lived shale-oil fracking than for extracting middle-distillates oil — if shale-oil fracking yields little of either middle-distillates-rich oil or natural gas, doesn’t shale-oil fracking use lots of diesel?
https://www.google.com/search?q=power+for+oil+drilling&oq=power+for+oil+drilling&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQIRigATIHCAIQIRigATIHCAMQIRigATIHCAQQIRirAjIHCAUQIRifBTIHCAYQIRifBTIHCAcQIRifBTIHCAgQIRifBTIHCAkQIRifBdIBCjU2MDY3ajBqMTWoAgiwAgHxBXSLlvmfF4Um8QV0i5b5nxeFJg&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
There is always associated natural gas with drilling. I have seen such natural gas burned for electricity with offshore drilling.
But I suppose drilling mostly uses diesel fuel to operate large motors. Natural gas is usually a whole lot cheaper, so I would imagine that would be used if it were feasible.
Long term pumping doesn’t require nearly the power as drilling the well in the first place. I have seen long-term pumping powered by electricity.
Which ethnic group ran the mob in Cuba before the revolution? Ran the gambling, provided prostitutes, provided drugs, etc.. Which group will it be this time?
Job availability, are you asking about?
Key Mobsters:
Meyer Lansky (Jewish-American),
Santo Trafficante Jr. (Italian-American).
India needs LNG to offset the intermittency of wind and solar, but it cannot afford today’s high prices. Most of India’s generation is coal, and it is not as quickly responsive as gas.
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/India-Explores-Gas-Power-Boost-to-Stabilize-Grid-During-Peak-Hours.html
India Explores Gas Power Boost to Stabilize Grid During Peak Hours
India is expected to import about 29 million tons of LNG this year, while its goal to almost double the share of gas in the energy mix to 15% will need import capacity of around 100 million tons, Kumar Singh, chief executive at Petronet Ltd, the biggest Indian LNG importer, said at the India Energy Week conference last month.
India, however, needs liquefied natural gas prices in Asia to nearly halve from current levels in order to significantly raise LNG imports and consumption, the executive added.
India is in no hurry to sign long-term LNG delivery deals as the country’s price-sensitive buyers stall talks and wait for the coming supply glut to pressure sellers into agreeing to lower prices.
But later this year, the LNG market is expected to tilt into oversupply and in a buyer’s market, in which India – and other price-sensitive buyers in Asia – could have the upper hand in negotiations with long-term LNG sellers.
Now people are talking about Epstein being a cannibal. YCanMTSU. Like I always say the Hand likes to go big. That’s why the BNS is gonna be the mother of all scares. It’s gonna be such a big scare that almost nobody here will believe it’s just a scare until it ends with a miracle.
Strange!
I’m starting to feel like well-documented proofs are coming re: JE involvement in JFK and Honest Abe’s assasinations. Carrington event too, somehow.
Something stinks.
Lol. The universe itself is a bastard child of Epstein. What does that make us in the eye of the Hand? A buncha loose turds in Don’s diaper? Hard to say how that apocalyptic genealogy works it’s only just being revealed. Stay tuned.
Kim Iverson episode on the cannibalism power of suggestion play. Within it is a clip of Rogan and an illuminati-style conspiracy theorist guest discussing the same. It never occurred to me that the Hand’s Disappearing Act 2.0 could actually be a symbolic Illuminati apocalypse wherein the Hand plants the jerky on Epstein and Co. Bold. Genius. Fun. And above all… Hollywood.
https://youtu.be/Q81FdVYyb4c?si=DOkJG2NfKg6_cY7Z
One bag of jerky coming up!
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Tm0p!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9fd68b8e-ec6a-4278-aaf0-6cd251d49d67_680x680.jpeg
Pass the jerky is the new pass the popcorn.
Antarctica is the last untouched resource. The ice can be cleared with nuclear explosions.
ed—i’ve taken upu off my eyeroll list
no longer worth it…..
Well, lets face it…. Antarctica has had it coming. Obviously, it has been doing something nefarious by specifically not engaging in economic activity as all the rest of the continents have been.
Something sinister is going on under all that ice. Why all the ice?
I’ve been keeping on eye on via webcam. You can see real time or the last year. They have built this huge compound at one of the webcam locations.
(free on laptop, click (CAMS) bottom right corner)
https://www.ventusky.com/
*McMurdo – Royal Society Range
https://www.ventusky.com/webcam-407296078
Look at that huge compound they built.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/2RFBEWDh31J4t4BH6
A map link. They really have a pretty big operation going on there.
Sea level rise will wipe some choice beachfront properties
Interesting point. I wonder how all of the minerals in Greenland will be freed, also. There is a whole lot of ice in Greenland, also.
Dr. Tim goes to ( non re-growing ) LinkedIn-wood..
aka the new condensed argument summary :
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2026/02/13/319-the-end-of-growth/
Excerpts from Dr. Tim Morgan’s Article, “The End of Growth.”
The Big Fact informing all of the sub-narratives of our age is that the global economy has stopped growing, and is starting to shrink.
We should swiftly dismiss all official or orthodox statistical claims to the contrary. GDP isn’t a measure of material value created in the economy, but of the transactional exchange of money in the system. Money routinely changes hands without value being added, and never more so than when most of the money in question has been conjured out of thin air as credit.
In reality, no form of money has any intrinsic worth. Obviously enough, we can’t eat fiat currencies, power our cars with cryptos, or sow our fields with precious metals. Rather, money is token, not substance – it commands value only as an exercisable claim on those physical products and services for which it can be exchanged.
This principle of money as claim leads directly to a conceptual necessity, which is that we need to think in terms of two economies, not one. The first is the “real” or physical economy of material products and services. The second is the parallel and proxy “financial” economy of money, transactions and credit.
Once this is understood, we are spared the futility of comparing money only with itself.
Later:
Our resistance to the very concept of an ending and reversal of growth has been vested in two false presumptions. One is that the material economy can be reinvigorated using monetary tools, which would be true only if the banking system could lend energy and raw materials into existence, or if central bankers could conjure them, ex nihilo, out of the ether.
The other is the supposedly “limitless” potential of human ingenuity, enacted as technology. In reality, the potential of technology, far from being limitless, is bounded by an envelope of possibility whose parameters are set by the characteristics of materials and the laws of thermodynamics.
The Headmaster is day late and a dollar short, but he dresses well if you’re into that kind of thing.
Europe Gets Rare LNG Cargo from China Amid Gas Crunch .😂
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Europe-Gets-Rare-LNG-Cargo-from-China-Amid-Gas-Crunch.html
This is bizarre:
Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that U.S. and Russian liquefied gas together accounted for over 80% of Europe’s seaborne gas imports. The U.S. share of that was 55% and Russian LNG accounted for mover 25%. That latter LNG will disappear from next year as the EU approved a complete ban on Russian gas imports earlier this year. As things stand now, the European Union is the largest buyer of Russian liquefied gas, absorbing half of the country’s total LNG output.
Despite record LNG imports, European countries are digging deeper into their gas storage, with EU-wide levels at just 35.62% full as of February 10th. In France, the level of gas in storage was even lower, at 26.09%, and in Germany it was 25.60%, according to Gas Infrastructure Europe.
The EU is crazy. It is desperate for any natural gas, even that from Russia. And China is too far away to send LNG. It also produces little natural gas itself.
King Charles drives decorator to suicide after criticising his work and giving the work to someone else, after his decades of loyalty.
Christopher John Eadie was found dead in the garden of his home on the Sandringham estate by his partner Joanne after becoming distraught over dwindling work and an ill-fated paint job
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/royal-decorator-took-life-after-36715365
Decades of loyalty decorating??? Did Chuck give it to a Muslim?
Another moron who did ‘his duty’ and throen away live a used food container.
I wish all stiffupper lipped people to go extinct.
This sounds like something from a Monty Python skit.
The painter was fired for getting his numbers muddled up.
https://youtu.be/l9Aj7W3g1qo?si=NFG4mh0mW_Y51g0_
Switzerland is going to vote on if they should cap their population to 10 million people
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/12/europe/switzerland-referendum-population-cap-10-million-intl
I responded to this comment before.
The current population is 9.0 million. The number of live births per mother is 1.43. The UN estimates in its medium population estimate that population will max out at 9.4 million in 2051, and then start falling.
As far as I can see, population is now growing because of immigrants and because people are tending to live longer. But the number of immigrants can be capped by decree. And, as the population ages, the impact of “living longer” decreases.
The United States is starving Cubans to death. Switzerland can take one million. It is just human decency.
The coming failure of Glen Canyon Dam
As Colorado River negotiations build toward a Feb. 14 deadline, few are talking about design flaws in the dam that holds back Lake Powell.
Wade Graham
February 11, 2026
https://www.hcn.org/articles/the-coming-failure-of-glen-canyon-dam/
“Floyd Dominy, the commissioner of the federal Bureau of Reclamation in the 1960s, was largely responsible for the construction of Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River. In 1963, when the dam was completed, he could not have foreseen the climate situation we find ourselves in today, with declining snowpack, record-high temperatures and alarmingly low water levels in Lake Powell, year after year. But he and his engineers could have, and should have, foreseen that the way they designed the dam would leave little room to maneuver should a water-supply crisis ever impact the river and its watershed.
Indeed, a state of crisis has been building on the Colorado for decades, even as the parties that claim its water argue over how to divide its rapidly diminishing flows. Lately, things have entered a new and perilous phase. Last Nov. 11 was a long-awaited deadline: Either the states involved — California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming — would have to agree on a new management plan, or else the federal government would impose its own, something none of the parties would welcome. Meanwhile, the 30 tribes that also hold claims to the river have historically been and continue to be excluded from these negotiations. ”
Alert CC is mentioned..so sorry
There are stories about looking back at the wettest 50-year period in history, when trying to plan for the water future in the West. Everyone tried to allocate more water than there was, or was likely to be.
Sorry? And so you should be. We don’t want to start Norman off again.
But seriously, it’s a very interesting article. The CC reference is mandatory these days in normie media, but the detailed description of how the dam was designed and how it works and how the various stakeholders are fighting over their rights to water that isn’t there is fascinating.
For me, the money quote was:
“The 710-foot-tall dam was designed for a world in which water levels would never be too high or too low, despite the fact that the Colorado is by far the most variable river in North America.”
You’d think that if the powers that be have the ability to create continent-wide snowstorms, as some conspiracy-minded people have suggested, they they would have no trouble conjuring up a few heavy rainstorms to fill the Colorado basin to any required depth of water. But the fact is, they can’t alter the weather on such a large scale, and so the rising population of the US Southwest are going to find water for washing, bathing, flushing, sprinkling the lawn, and filling the Jacuzzi more and more of a luxury in the coming years.
Trump revokes basis of US climate regulation, ends vehicle emission standards
By Valerie Volcovici and David Shepardson
February 12, 20261:53 PM UTCU pdated 14 mins ago
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/trump-administration-set-revoke-basis-us-climate-regulation-2026-02-12/
( Seems like this has not been posted here yet.. )
I’ll let this one pass censorship…OFW Police
Thanks Mike 🙂
You’re welcome…I’ll let this one pass to just for you and Tim
Donald Trump declares the Republican Party the pro-pollution party
EPA repeal puts polluters over public health
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/02/12/donald-trump-declares-the-republican-party-the-pro-pollution-party/
if this madness continues—-ie the country is policed by donnienuts, then the censorshop will hit hard and everywhere.—with no exceptions—-
already a thread i follow elsewhere is spelling t.r.u.m.p. thus—-
why should that be?
because as AI takes on more intrusive control of the media, percieved insults to his royal donnyness will be picked up, and the site closed.
I know there will be derision from flat earthers on OFW—but this danger is real, and it is immediate.
I have American friends who are now scared for their future—It is a fear that should not be in a country like America….but it is.
People are being hunted and shot openly on the streets.—by people who enjoy their work.
I warned (in very general terms) about this ten years ago….
if the 26 and 28 elections are blatantly rigged, as seems likely—it wont be donny you have to be concerned about—he is only the useful idiot anyway—it will be those behind him.
as i said years ago—soldiers follow whoever pays their wages.—check the ice.gov website.
Calm yourself, Norman. Take your meds, or whatever it is you do when you work yourself up into this state.
America has always had a more violent and aggressive culture than the English West-Midlands. And it probably always will have.
The more sensitive Americans have always been concerned about the prospect of something wicked this way coming. I have American friends who have been scared to set foot inside their home country for decades.
And whenever I’ve visited the place, in even small towns, I have always been warned by friendly natives not to go into this or that neighborhood, even in the daytime.
“There are feral people there who would knock a tourist like you down within ten minutes of you getting out of the taxi, rob you of your passport, traveller’s checks, wallet and watch—if you’re lucky.”
During the American Civil War, the wife and son of Missouri farmer Josey Wales are murdered by pro-Union paramilitaries led by the brutal Captain Terrill. After burying their corpses, Wales seeks vengeance for his family by joining a group of Confederate bushwhackers under the command of William T. Anderson, attacking the Union Army and pro-Union sympathizers. After the war ends in 1865, Wales’s superior, Captain Fletcher, persuades his men to surrender, having been promised amnesty by Union Senator Jim Lane. However, Terrill’s men massacre the bushwhackers after they surrender, with Wales, Fletcher, and fellow bushwhacker Jamie being the only survivors. Wales and Jamie flee, and Lane forces Fletcher to assist Terrill in hunting them down. A mortally wounded Jamie helps Wales kill two bounty hunters before dying.
With a $5,000 bounty on his head, Wales flees to Texas. On the way he meets elderly Cherokee man Lone Watie, who informs Wales that Confederate General Joseph O. Shelby is fleeing to Mexico and suggests they do likewise. Wales subsequently rescues young Navajo woman Little Moonlight and kills two other bounty hunters. Alongside Little Moonlight, Wales also rescues an elderly Kansan woman Sarah Turner and her granddaughter Laura Lee from marauding Comancheros. At the town of Santo Rio, two employees of Turner’s dead son Tom, Travis Cobb and Chato, also join the group. Wales and his companions find Tom’s abandoned ranch and settle down there. Discovering that Travis and Chato have been kidnapped by Comanche chief Ten Bears, Wales rides into his camp and negotiates the return of the two men; an impressed Ten Bears becomes blood brothers with Wales.
A bounty hunter whose partner was killed by Wales at Santo Rio guides Terrill and his men to the town. On the following morning, Terrill’s men launch a surprise attack on the ranch, but Wales’s companions manage to gun them all down. Wounded and out of ammunition, Wales follows the fleeing Terrill back to Santo Rio, where he corners him. A wounded Terrill attempts to draw his sabre, but Wales grabs his hand and forces the blade through Terrill’s chest, killing him. Returning to the town saloon, Wales discovers its patrons telling Fletcher, accompanied by two Texas Rangers, that an outlaw named Josey Wales was recently killed in Monterrey by five gunmen. The Rangers accept the story and leave, while Fletcher pretends not to recognize Wales, and tells him he will go to Mexico himself to look for Wales and tell him the war is over. Wales responds by stating, “I reckon so. I guess we all died a little in that damned war.” He then rides off into the sunset.
Traveler’s checks how quaint.
Norm you know we always expected climate change regs to be removed. Nicole Foss predicted that. MPP in desperate times and all. At your age you’re probably farting loudly without realizing it, and now you don’t have to feel bad about it anymore. Nevermind the emissions.
@Tim
That film was directed an acted by Clint Eastwood, so he always had a soft spot on nonwhites even back then.
Which is why he did not kill the black boxer who destroyed his Million Dollar baby and dies for some Laotian boy in Gran Torino.
Interesting statistic from this next short video. 17,000 children were shot dead in the years 2009 and 2020 in the USA. And very few of this killings were performed by “donnienuts.”
Yet Norman is suddenly upset that “people are being hunted and shot openly on the streets.—by people who enjoy their work.”
All I can say, Norman, is, where have you been?
It’s OK, we know where you’ve been. You’ve been bingeing out on Guardian editorials and CNN, haven’t you?
Just want to amend your comment to say it was 17,000 deaths in the 11 years between 2009 and 2020. And FWIW most of those kids are young men 15-17 years old
Thanks for clarifying that. Me and my typos!
I should think most of the killers were around the same demographic. A lot of boys, especially, tend to get very high spirited after going through puberty.
CO2 emissions regulations seemed to simply enable more manufacturing in areas with coal production and minimal worker protections. World CO2 emissions rose, rather than fell.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-admin/upload.php?item=53524
So, Gail, what you really mean is we people going to extract and/or burn everything we have access to in order to keep the darn thing spinning on the razors edge. You mean to say living sum zero ain’t possible or natural (especially with @9 billion two legged)
Say it ain’t so, I like a happy ending.
Oh, here’s something
Medieval gold ring with dazzling blue gemstone discovered in Norway is a ‘fantastically beautiful and rare specimen’
News
By Kristina Killgrove published 2 days ago
The delicate gold ring was made sometime in the Middle Ages and may have belonged to a high-status woman.
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/medieval-gold-ring-with-dazzling-blue-gemstone-discovered-in-norway-is-a-fantastically-beautiful-and-rare-specimen
An archaeologist excavating a medieval town in southern Norway had an “out-of-body experience” when she stumbled upon a dream find: a delicate gold ring with a dazzling blue gemstone.
Last summer, Åsheim was working in the center of Tønsberg, Norway’s oldest city. Over the course of two seasons, archaeologists had begun to uncover houses, streets and other remnants of medieval Tønsberg, which was originally founded in the ninth century. The medieval town was located just below a royal castle complex erected by the Yngling dynasty of Scandinavian kings.
No worrries
Did the Unabomber know about Epstein island?
Yale Professor Under Review Says He’s ‘Very Glad’ He Wrote Epstein Email
Yale University said a prominent computer science professor will not teach classes while the school reviews his conduct following the release of emails showing he described an undergraduate student’s appearance in a message to Jeffrey Epstein.
The professor, David Gelernter, 70, has been on Yale’s faculty since 1982 and is known for his work in parallel computing and for helping develop the Linda programming system. He also survived a 1993 mail bombing carried out by “Unabomber” Theodore Kaczynski that left him seriously injured.
https://www.newsweek.com/yale-david-gelernter-removed-teaching-jeffrey-epstein-emails-11508416
On topic, for a change! 🙂
This sounds like a better use for rapeseed oil than feeding it to humans.
This breakthrough revolutionises the diesel engine and could save millions of vehicles
By Greenholt Colin
Across Europe, diesel drivers face bans, new stickers and shrinking city access, yet one lab test is unsettling every prediction.
Researchers say a standard diesel engine can run on pure rapeseed oil, without fossil fuel, and with far cleaner emissions. If this holds at scale, the technology could keep millions of diesel cars and vans on the road in low-emission zones that seemed ready to shut them out.
Rapeseed oil gives diesel a second chance
Diesel has been under pressure since the Dieselgate scandal, with many cities planning to phase it out. Yet diesel engines remain popular with long-distance drivers, farmers and fleets for their durability and low fuel consumption. Scientists at RUDN University, working in partnership with European teams, have been searching for a way to keep that efficiency while cutting pollution.
Their latest work focuses on a simple but radical idea: replacing standard diesel with pure rapeseed oil, a plant-based fuel already familiar in agriculture and food production.
https://www.directpathways.co.uk/12-171373-this-breakthrough-revolutionises-the-diesel-engine-and-could-save-millions-of-vehicles/
=====
The entire article and webpage looks like it was created by AI in its tea break. It is trying to paint a rosy picture of how biodiesel could be cleanly burned in diesel engines, allowing them to keep running in European cities while saving the earth, etc. Sadly, it doesn’t touch on the issue of not enough diesel to go round.
I thought that rapeseed oil (canola oil in the US) was an expensive extender of diesel. It can be blended in to diesel, but that is about all.
This is a 2021 article from Russia:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/670/1/012019
Biodiesel Fuel Based on Rapeseed Oil
The study aims to determine comparative operational parameters of a diesel engine when running on diesel fuel and fuel based on rapeseed oil. Rapeseed oil differs significantly from diesel fuel in viscosity and flash temperature; if diesel viscosity is 4.3 mm2/s, rapeseed oil viscosity is 75.1 mm2/s. The mixture consisting of 75% rapeseed oil and 25% diesel fuel has a thickness of 36.0 mm2/s, and the density and lower combustion heat are close to the diesel fuel parameters. The studies on preparing the rapeseed oil and diesel fuel mixture have been carried out in the South Ural State Agrarian University. They resulted in developing a production line for making the fuel mixture and conducting the comparative tests of the D-240 engine when working on diesel mineral fuel and when working on fuel consisting of a mix of 75% rapeseed oil and 25% diesel fuel. The authors find that at a nominal frequency of engine crankshaft rotation (2,170 rpm), the engine efficient power is 53.3 kW, running both on diesel fuel and on a mixture of rapeseed oil and diesel fuel. With the same torque of 235 N/m, the efficient fuel mixture consumption is only 17 g/kWh more. This gives the reasons for using this mixture as a fuel in a diesel engine in terms of energy parameters.
This is another article:
https://ijrar.org/papers/IJRAR1BWP085.pdf
Blended Diesel with Rapeseed Oil : An Alternative Substitute for Conventional Fuel
Biodiesel isn’t made this way. There is probably a reason why. This is one biodiesel article:
https://engineerfix.com/how-do-you-make-biodiesel-the-production-process-explained/
Right. canola is a useful additive for kerosene, as it creates the right viscosity for a diesel substitute (even then in small amounts). It is much too heavy to use alone. and at any rate it is an even more finite resource…
I imagine the interest in Rapeseed/Canola oil mostly comes in places with cold climates, since rapeseed/canola grows well in Canada and Russia. But it would use a product that is normally used for food.
Even as food rapeseed is marginal. Sunflower cake (what remains after it is pressed for oil) is generally a prized feed, very good for finishing (fattening) animals. Rapeseed cake is forbidden in the EU due to high toxicity. It is due to erucic acid, which is also in the oil sold in stores. (But it is a good plant to have in a rotation)
That [ Erucic acid ] in Brassicas – suppossedly damaging hearth muscle, also present inside mustard seed as well (e.g. Maille Dijon). Well, there are several fabulous ( human-oid key ) dishes deemed impossible w.out it, so I f@% it..
I’ll go through several 200g little bottles per y.. and too old to change my habits.
PS other studies say it’s healthy otherwise ( in other respects ) lol
when animals fatten they might get a kg a day. even seemingly benign foods, like olive cake, are unsuitable for animals consumption. the dose is the poison.
Thanks for the linked information, Gail.
One of my mates here in Kyoto has a Volkswagen diesel sedan that runs on used cooking oil. I can smell the aroma of fried chicken and tempura when he’s driving it.
Just checking on line, I found a video of a man who ran his VW on cooking oil as an experiment. I’m not sure where he’s doing this, but the accent sounds Central European to me.
I suppose that if you are desperate, you will do anything. Perhaps the taxation of cooking oil versus diesel could be sufficiently different to make cooking oil appear to be a worthwhile option.
It was a phenomenon like ~20yrs ago all across the world ( ala enthusiast garage hacking ), back then diesel motor architecture was alluded – favorable to that approach.
It’s ~impossible to apply in today’s gen of diesel engines (oem carz).
“It’s ~impossible to apply in today’s gen of diesel engines (oem carz). ”
Thanks . Never thought about this . The ECU would shut down the engine .
Yes, but not only ECU and emission addons, mechanics are different as well inside / around the engine block.. and fuel injection .., ..
In simplistic terms they were designed then for very high milage-lifespan almost in Mio kms .. provided specific fuel – cheap diesel of varied quality available.
These conditions CAN’t be satisfied are “not needed” by now..
New high pressure common rail engines no likey veg oil
I can believe that!
We know biofuels exist… Thing is:
1. They are less energy dense than fossil fuels
2. Their EROI is closer to 1:1, or even less
3. They damage vehicle parts. Look up how in Brazil, where’s mandatory to mix biodiesel with diesel, even Toyota Hilux engines are breaking – for Toyota, the blame sits clearly with the bad fuel.
And the biggest drawback:
4. Most of grain agriculture today serves two ends, the first one being food security as cheap staple calories even if they are unhealthy in the end, and the second one is that they basically sustain the entirety of industrial animal husbandry, be it pigs, chicken and specially cattle. So you would have to shut it all down to redirect their use for fuels. In Brazil, they have this same dilemma with Sugarcane – which is more profitable? To make ethanol with it, or just plain sugar? When it’s ethanol, sugar prices skyrocket, and when it’s sugar, gas prices skyrocket.
By the way, do you understand why they want to shut down meat consumption? It’s so they can diverge grains from being food to being used as fuel. A guy who talks a lot about it is Bill Gates, and surprise surprise, he has many investments in biodiesel manufacturing.
This is no solution to anything.
What can I say ? How about ” Hope is a poison that keeps you alive ” .😭
I wasn’t expecting biofuels to save the world, or anything like that, but in my friend’s case, the fuel is used cooking oil that has to be disposed of somehow in any case. They can’t keep frying using the same oil indefinitely. And pouring it down the toilet isn’t wonderful for the environment.
As to why thy want to shut down meat consumption, the story they tell is it’s to save the world from cow farts and prevent cruelty to animals. But I suspect they just don’t like the useless eaters to enjoy themselves. It’s an interesting question though.
As a university student in summer I drove from restaurant to restaurant to collect and recycle precisely that. It was used to make soap.
“By the way, do you understand why they want to shut down meat consumption? It’s so they can diverge grains from being food to being used as fuel.”
That could be their plan. But I am not sure that they can carry it out. Self-organizing systems seem to pick winners from a total societal benefit point of view. The winners are likely to vary from area to area, especially if the world economy becomes more localized.
That’s indeed a great point.
Local condition specialization forcing is about to return / prevail ..
Yes, and biology is a self organizing system. A guess is that our social structure is secondary to biology as economics is also secondary to biology.
This implies we are not deterministic and free will may be an illusion.
Dennis L.
I agree. We all operate within fairly narrow boundaries related to our circumstances. Many of us commenters have been fairly well off, so we had more options open to us than people who didn’t “choose their parents” and circumstances as well.
if food is converted into fuel, then that fuel requires purpose. (otherwise there’s no point in having it in the first place)
purpose ultimately requires people.
if the number of people is drastically reduced, then the requirement for fuel will also be drastically reduced…
i suppose this kind of thinking could emanate from donnynuts, but it is ultimately a none-sense, with no bearing in economic reality
The fuel can run generators to power AI and robots. “To power the future”
eyerolling time ed
I only waste energy on eyerolls when i think there may be a chance of reality taking root.
Without people, there will be no AI or robots to waste energy on–ie no purpose.
without people, modern existence has no point—
unless youve been too many repeats of terminator…
It goes like this:
1. Remove meat consumption. “Cows are causing global warming!”
2. You have now 77% of the world’s usable land that was previously being used for ranching to now be used for crops for biofuels.
3. Also, direct human consumption of grains was very small compared to its use as animal fodder, so you also gain from already existing production.
4. Biofuels get used to produce society’s fuel needs.
4. Of course, mass depopulation happens somewhere in this transition.
5. You need very little people to run industrial agriculture at mass scale, so, “theoretically”, a whole world worth of biofuel crops could be run by ~500million people, maybe even less, who knows.
You would still have very dismall EROIs, but they are betting on the massive amount of Net Energy it would generate.
Well, this is at least one of the “solutions” pursued by the elites. Of course, all of them include mass dyings.
And by the way, I don’t agree with it as a feasible solution – I”m just saying this is the rationale behind the meat ban propaganda and the biofuels push.
I’m explaining the agenda, the real reason, not “the good reason” that appears in the media.
we cannot grow fuel, in order to feed engines
to drive machinery
in order to grow more fuel
—the concept is bonkers i’m afraid—always has been
I dunno.
Your claim, as stated, resembles this one:
We cannot cut down trees, in order to make axe handles
to power axes
in order to cut down more trees
Obviously, there is a lot more to the energy system than biofuels. But at the same time, there is arguably a rational use for biofuels within the energy system.
Nobody, apart from your good self, has ever imagined that anyone else had ever suggested that biofuels could become the be all and end all of fuels.
Coconut Oil – Papua New Guinea
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6KChpTMfUI
The people of Bougainville have come up with their own solution to the energy crisis — coconut oil. It’s cheap, plentiful and doesn’t pollute. Little wonder other countries, are considering importing it.
From priests to the police force, locals are making the switch to coconut fuel. “There’s no difference in performance and you don’t have to do anything different to your car”, states one consumer. Bougainville hopes to export coconut fuel to other countries. Unfortunately, in cooler climates, coco-fuels solidify and requires the addition of diesel.
May 2007
Produced by ABC Australia
Distributed by Journeyman Pictures
It’s a waste and a sin to burn coconut oil. That’s one of the healthiest oils around, for people to eat.
A better solution would be to ship rapeseed oil half way around the world on sailing ships to Bougainville and ship coconut oil back half way round the world to Europe and America.
We could get the Cutty Sark out of dry dock and repurpose it for this noble green cause!
The great 50min Bougainville documentary called “The Coconut Revolution” for anyone who missed it back in the day and wants to spend the time. It’s about their indigenous struggle against a Rio Tinto mine opening up on their land.
https://youtu.be/Zvhd3tt7fx4?si=pDrfjFiyx6CPLUnz
Absurd, preposterous, ludicrous? I can see musk saying this but Suleyman seems the sober type. Let’s pretend so. The ramifications are shattering but I’d think everyone keeps their wages maybe monitoring results. But then the have nots can demand a universal do nothing wage also. Of course AI can’t generate more power.
I can see AI wrecking havoc in educational system right now but no one wants to deal with it. For instance if you had an AI certified degree you’d be discriminated against (even if you scored top percentile).
https://www.zerohedge.com/ai/microsoft-ai-ceo-warns-most-white-collar-jobs-will-be-fully-automated-within-next-12-18-months
Optimists seem to abound. People who sell AI tools have a reason to claim that they will provide great results.
Zombies replaced by ai is not a bad thing
Zombies, efficiently and ecologically converted into valuable biodiesel would be even more beneficial civilizationally…
Informal EU Council on energy ~crisis concluded..
Agreement only on electricity x natgas price un-bundling so far.
EU Comm. tasked with preparing proposals for the next real scheduled Council meeting (few weeks time), but at the moment NO agreement – will to drop emission mandates among the members at all..
Any article links available?
Just indiv presser right out of the meeting, mmt..
Fico’s (SK) presser on the return flight
(auto ENG from ytvid doesn’t work?)
—
but text summary ok :
https://www-teraz-sk.translate.goog/ekonomika/videofico-ocenil-navrh-oddelit-plyn-o/940733-clanok.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=cs&_x_tr_pto=wapp
—
from EU site:
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/meetings/european-council/2026/02/12/
“Energy
The energy transition remains the best long-term strategy for Europe to achieve strategic autonomy and lower prices.
In view of electricity prices, President Costa stressed that we need pragmatic solutions that take into account the specific challenges of member states and some industrial sectors.
Working closely with the European Commission, EU leaders will look at concrete measures at the European Council meeting in March.”
—
ps more precisely it’s about ” ETS1,2 ” – for now meaning trading arrangement/pricing (not overall emissions package)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/eus-von-der-leyen-defends-carbon-market-after-leaders-criticism-2026-02-12/
Last page I have described why the artificially inflated IQs of the strivers are worse than useless since they crowd out more capable people.
Their IQs are focused upon getting ahead of others, while accomplishing absolutely nothing, as seen in footages of China in 1900s, its last days as an Empire where the Mandarins, selected by the methods which favor the strivers, developed a system which benefit their own class and no one else.
There is a reason the eunuchs, mostly coming from classes which do not produce strivers (those with means would not send their sons to be castrated to serve as palace slaves) often won against the mandarins since at least eunuchs knew the street smarts, having survived the environments which made them survive infancy and go through the castration process before antibiotics.
The delusionists and some test takers will support the stirvers but I am afraid these test taking automata are unlikely to develop the devices the delusionists desire. Their aim is to get cushy jobs, draw huge salaries and live more or less comfortably, or , in other words, just take up space and crowd those who actually do have ability out.
I think the Chinese Imperial System would have collapsed long ago without the eunuchs, who provided the class which added street smarts to the government while , because of their very nature, unable to form their own ruling clans. Somewhat like what Plato , whom a delusionist hates, had described in his book.
tl.dr. the world will lose nothing without the useless ‘IQ’s’ of the strivers. Their talents are , simply , not needed.
great. within a 3 week window, you went from pro-IQ to anti-IQ. to abandon the singularity took longer.
Useless, fake IQs of trained zombies.
capable of engineering feats the western rentiers can only dream of.
Capable only because the (former) Globalists (and now national socialist architects in transition) saw that potential in turning them into their Chonoisie bitches. You are just cheerleading them because of your business interests.
The world loses nothing if we lobotomize everyone born outside of the Hajnal line with a claimed IQ of more than, say, 125.
Your opinion, not necessarily anyone else’s
Chinoisie. New word. Let’s call it a portmanteau of Chinese and bourgeoisie.
That’s correct Gail I can only hold my own opinions about the venerable drb’s recent bargaining tack.
the Chinese are the only hope to get rid of the pervs in charge. They have a vested historical interest due to the Boxer wars.
and also because they are going to treat the world better, at least for a while. if you are anti-war you can not be in favor of the West.
Agree with you kulm. The world will be far better off without civilizational strivers. They’re all functional narcissists.
Interesting, “functional narcissists” often ~unintentionally wake-up destructive forces on the par of charging mounted Genghis Khan horde.
Don’t ask me how I now..
( Serious post )
28 Days Later and the world looks very different.
U.S. Shale Majors Take Fracking Global
U.S. shale producers are expanding overseas—from Argentina and Turkey to Australia and the UAE—as domestic shale basins mature and well productivity declines.
Continental Resources is one example. The company of fracking icon Harold Hamm has been expanding in Argentina’s Vaca Muerta shale play, widely considered the second-largest shale oil and gas deposit after the Permian. In the last three months, Continental made two asset acquisition deals in the Vaca Muerta, with its chief executive, Doug Lawler, calling it “one of the most compelling shale plays in the world.”
Meanwhile, the former chief executive of Parsley Energy, Bryan Sheffield, is investing in Australian unconventional energy resources. The Financial Times reported last month that Sheffield—son of Pioneer Natural Resources’ Scott Sheffield—is the biggest shareholder in a company called Tamboran Resources. The company holds the drilling rights to acreage spanning close to 2 million acres in Australia’s Beetaloo basin. The basin is considered to be one of the biggest shale gas deposits globally, with Australia’s Northern Territory government reporting estimated resources of over 500 trillion cu ft in discovered and prospective gas.
According to a recent Wall Street Journal article on U.S. shale drillers’ expansion campaign abroad, the move has been prompted by peaking production at home. The article cited a Wood Mackenzie analyst as saying the global expansion was in fact, long overdue, stumped by the prolific resources of the Permian, which kept everyone’s attention focused on oil and gas resources at home.
The global expansion of American shale majors is very likely to continue and intensify in the coming years. According to a senior researcher from Enverus, the big shale players have about 7.5 years of high-quality—meaning low-cost—shale reserves, and smaller players only hold around 2.5 years’ worth of top-notch acreage that can return 10% on investment at WTI below $50 per barrel. With forecasts about oil demand changing radically, from peak demand by 2030 to growth until at least 2050, global expansion is the only way to keep the shale oil flowing.
“We’re approaching the point at which we are going to have to find new sources of production. OPEC spare capacity is starting to shrink, U.S. shale is maturing. If demand keeps growing, where are those barrels going to come from?” Dan Pickering from Pickering Energy Partners told the WSJ.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/US-Shale-Majors-Take-Fracking-Global.html
Hail Mary pass . All crap . Harold Hamm has invested in Vaca Muerta because his assets in the US are now in a ” dead state ” — So what . It is an old project and not a start up . His interest is only financial . Operations are run by a consortium led by Repsol . All other mentioned basins are in waterstarved areas . Shale uses abnormal amounts of water . What about the “special sand ” and guar and proponnats , chemicals ? Look up the map and see where these basins are located and you will realize this is BS . Evidently depletion and decline rates are now not confined only to oil fields but also to oil journalism .
“Evidently depletion and decline rates are now not confined only to oil fields but also to oil journalism”
lol
I am serious . Another one here . https://www.domesticoperating.com/blog/2025/09/28/u-s-shale-oil-costs-set-to-hit-95-breakeven-point-invest-now-with-domestic/
https://www.iea.org/reports/oil-market-report-february-2026
Oil demand is expected up and surplus is down
This seems to be closely related to the Oil and Gas Journal article I quoted a couple of days ago.
Argentina’s oil from shale production is definitely ramping up. It took a while, I suspect partly because it didn’t have the pipeline infrastructure needed, the way Texas did.
But I agree with Ravi. Whether or not oil from shale will be ramped up elsewhere is iffy. Probably a different technique for extraction will be needed that doesn’t use as many scarce resources will be needed. That is likely a long way off.
It seems to me that shale works best if it is paired with some bitumen resource. There is limited economic value in shale but shale plus tar plus some ungodly amount of energy does something.
I agree.
I’m wondering is the Arctic shelf truly the last frontier ?
At some point they will have to bite into this sour last cookie though.
So, instead it seems as long shale could be had around the world in more favorable climates and with lesser expense we are not against the proverbial terminal wall.
Hence, quasi BAU continues for several more decades..
Obviously with the proviso several states, regions might be (will be)
thrown out of then spinning wurlitzer way sooner, hence also “saving” some of the resources for the longer run still.
A major concern is that the Arctic Shelf may have mostly natural gas and little oil. Natural gas is problematic to ship and it doesn’t sell for very much. Oil would be much preferred, but it seems to exist in warmer areas of the world, mostly.
j says:
February 11, 2026 at 4:17 am
“But at the same time, I think consumers are just as greedy as investors. They always seem to demand more in return than they pay. If you work in the business of selling products or providing services and observe your customers closely, you’ll see this. When consumers say they don’t need a new product, I think they’re asking you to sell it cheaper. To give it away for free. Many online businesses also offer free services. ”
When some people say they do not need a new product, sometimes they mean they do not want it. It seems like some salespeople desperate to meet their quotas cannot take no for an answer and try to give it away for “free” so they can meet their sales quotas. The customer never wanted it but ends up accepting the product due to the aggressive sales pitch of the salesperson and walks away with a free product or service they do not want. There’s no such thing as free service or product. Someone is always paying. Often, everyone pays more than is necessary so everyone can get something for “free”.
“Semiconductor manufacturing plants require investments of several trillion yen, and products incorporating these products must be priced so that consumers can afford them. Related companies also need to make a profit.”
If a company can continue selling the same product at the same price, I think they will choose to do so. It’s more profitable, there’s no need to borrow additional money, and there are no CEO liability issues.
They DO have that option but reject it and bully others who try to pursue that option so that the only course of action is the ones with rising costs and rising profits called “growth”.
“Once digital fiat currency is adopted, there will be no need for savings. Digital currency can also be used to set expiration dates and payment targets, so I think we will move toward a de facto fully controlled economy.”
Don’t call it rationing…
I’m not sure why people think we need electricity and computers to do Communism. Digital currencies seem like a ridiculously complex and resource intensive way to plan an economy and allocate available resources especially if electricity supplies are limited in the future.
It would be a lot more cost-effective for the governments to do what they did in the past and just pass laws on how much could be produced and distributed. A person can have fifty dollars or fifty thousand dollars, the amount of goods and services available would be limited. No planned economic system will prevent people from hoarding resources. Digital currencies would not negate governments from having to seize stored surpluses. The fantasy of machines eliminating all need for human labor, including white collar labor is just that– a fantasy. A fully controlled economy will need a lot of human intervention to keep it operating.
I know that governments are looking into digital currencies. You are probably right that they are intended as rationing devices, and currency will come with an expiration date. In the US, my impression has been that they will start as a convenient way to distribute food stamps and other government benefits. Whether other payment mechanisms will completely disappear is uncertain. And, I agree with you with respect to concern that digital currencies won’t work without electricity.
Our big problem going forward likely will be not having enough goods and services. As I see it, smaller, more local governments will probably come up with money schemes that are primarily useful in their own areas. The question is, “How much central control will today’s governments continue to have, going forward?” I am guessing, “Less and less.”
An economist once said that economics is the study of deciding how much of finite resources to allocate to each person.
In a rationing system, it seems like everyone is provided with a uniform amount of goods or services. I think it would be even better if we could dynamically allocate a usage limit for goods, services, or resources to each person, and review those usage limits every month.
I think your smart devices, like your mobile phones, know you better than you might imagine. They also have highly powerful MPUs, so most necessary processing can be completed on the device itself. It might be possible to optimize how much of the remaining resources should be distributed to each person.
It seems possible to build such a system using digital fiat currency.
The problem is not the system . The problem is the control . The control of the system uses voracious amount of energy . Case in study the old FSU . Controlling the people ate up their energy . Yes , todays surviellance and communications is very efficient but still avoiding a SINGLE terrorist attack is involving the whole deep state NSA , DHS , TSA , CIA , FBI , Pentagon etc . All use energy .
The FSU entered (or as tweaked along the way ) a long drawn sparring match with the opposite party just ~printing hard earned physical resources along the way, among other host of applied cunning tricks. Result, towards the end ( precipice ) did not compute ( adjust ), catastrophic failure ensued..
The surveillance ( sub ) question of the authoritarian state was parallel not primary point of contention, *imho.
—
* corroborated by historic account and alt. route taken ( Vlad’s key rule principles instead ) for the core remainder of that state entity
Soviet system was very inefficient. Largely because people were not allowed to compete for material rewards (think about “enterprises” on the level of a lemonade stand were being cruelly suppressed). Widespread apathy in society, alcoholism among men (including my own relatives) and enormous waste of resources almost everywhere. Largely everybody (who was not a state employee and/or secret police member) was surviving on bare minimums. Continuous deficits of almost everything, low quality medical care (education in exact sciences was OK, but social sciences were outright lies). State-inposed quazi-religion with strict hierarchy of Marxist/Leninist deities, prophets and martyrs (my father tells me now nobody believed in it – but he did not tell me that back in early 1980s 😅). Then fully planned and prepared controlled demolition in December 1991 and the following 3-4 years of a moderate to severe economic collapse. Soviets were always afraid of and suppressing their own people (that’s why the idea of an Internet-like system was actively sabotaged by “apparatchiks” back in 1960s – commies bewared of proles’ self-organization and of popular revolt against their tyranny). Cheap vodka and rotten sausage (made from mystery meat) – reliably rationed to keep those potentially violent males inebriated and docile. As frugal, puritan and miserly might have Soviet system been at the bottom (for me and mine), as catastrophically wasteful and viciously profuse it actually was on the system level. I do not believe in Central Planning since those days. Also, human nature is still the same – think Animal Farm and 1984 (both books were strictly prohibited back in USSR).
I think the inefficiency of the soviet system contributed to the collapse. Also, the low selling price of oil in the 1982 to 1991 period.
The Soviet system underwent several dev stages, lets not cherry pick, and evaluate it merely in doctrinal strictly one way w-propaganda silo fashion..
The rapid industrialization (partly also incl. western tech transfer) since mid 1920s onwards was paid via resource extraction (exports w-bound), yes at huge enviro and human toll.
In the mid 1930s ~faction of western capital started to support Adolf’s war-industrial rise w. the eastern expansion promises in mind..
With the concluding decade around the Munich crisis, UK+FR dumped their ally CZE, and PL was instructed NOT to allow defense-treaty ready shipments from the Soviets.
Next, Adolf double crossed the w-financiers and attacked cunningly west first (NOT) east/Soviets as alluded previously to w-sponsors.
Then later during the ongoing full eastern front warfare the destruction of infrastructure in Soviet area was on unprecedented scale vs ~token comparative damage during Blitz over London or FR.
At the end of the war, allies raced to occupy regions in powerplay style, chiefly the US rushed in order Soviets NOT moving to much to the west. Hence they secured Bavaria-DE,
Pilsen-CZE and so on, while Soviets managed to move the prewar eastern frontier by many hundred kms way closer, up to say Dresden and E-Berlin.
Towards the war conclusion, especially, the (ever uber-treacherous) British, even played with concepts (not given go) such as ~OP Unthinkable, i.e. directly attack Soviets and kick them out of Europe.
Soon after the WWII concluded, the cold war was enacted firstly in the W->E direction not the other way around. Obviously Soviets secured their own E-European dominion towards the end of the post WWII 1940s..
..
.
PS the above account clearly to illustrate relative (world)hegemonic vs underdog position, yes also very much deepened by self inflicted Soviet’s own mistakes both in domestic/foreign policy through following decades and ongoing cold war installments..
This is a very revealing exposition of one of the many legs of the “climate” scam—the claim that it is warmer these days than it was around a century ago. The New York Times has a website claiming to show an increase in 90 degree days in US cities. In this short video, Tony Heller fact checks their claims using app.visitech.ai, which he created, by going straight to the raw data and showing clearly that the NYT has hidden the inconvenient data that would invalidate their claims.
https://realclimatescience.com/2025/12/fact-checking-the-new-york-times/#gsc.tab=0
You realize, Tim, Gail has repeatedly pointed out that this is NOT a “Climate Change” forum…..
For that please go this this one
https://climateandeconomy.com/
I will refrain on your baseless because it is without merit if you visit the about website
LOL Mike, who made you the OFW police?
Not me, just saving Gail (another)reprimand,
PS Who made you. Sergeant at arms?
LOL
Keep polishing that apple, Mike, and perhaps Gail will make you teacher’s pet.
My comment, incidentally, was not about climate change. It was about how maximum US temperatures in many (and possibly most—I haven’t checked them all) not increased over the past century, so it was actually a comment about climate consistency.
If you go to the raw data from the weather stations outside of areas that have experienced substantial urban development and subsequently warmed due to the heat island effect, I am confident that you, being a reasonable sort of chap, will come to see and appreciate that in the United States, the 1930s was the warmest decade ever in terms of daily maximums.
I brought this up because Norman, the class dunce, made a not-so-sly dig on the CC theme:
the science of climate change, has warned all along that it would cause extreme fluctuations in weather patterns….
the dimbos amongst us, from donnie downwards, insist that climate change and weather are the same thing…(with a sharpie to prove it)….
they are clearly not, but that never deters the fakemongers….
And he also gave an erroneous description of recent climate history:
the global population evolved to live where food supply is at an optimum level….
famines in different areas are anomalies which did not affect the overall population distribution….
that went on for millenia…, within a certain temperature balance
we have interrupted that sequence of ‘normality’ by growing food by artificial means, allowing people to thrive where they shouldn’t…
that has disturbed the temperature balance in ways we cannot control….hotter has effects we cannot foresee and control…
this will distrurb food growth ….outside those optimum growth patterns, thus we might produce far more food in one place, and far less in another, and we will not have the means or inclination to ship it from one place to another
I’ve quoted him in full here to avoid the accusation that I have taken him out of context.
I am tired of the many lies and mischaracterizations spread about climate by both professional charlatans and by people affected by Dunning-Kruguer syndrome who are mindlessly repeating “facts” that are manifestly not true.
Other people may be more concerned by other kinds of false propaganda. There is a lot of it about. Reante, for instance, seems irritated that most people still believe in viruses.
Here, I am just doing my bit to point out that the raw data shows that the US was warmer in the 1930s than at any time since, and yet due to propaganda and the useful idiots who repeat it, almost nobody is aware of that verifiable fact. Lamentably, the vast majority of people are blinded and bamboozled. I’ve given up on them. They are beyond hope. Let them wallow in their ignorance. See if I care.
George Carlin was right. “It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got.”
And Mencken said it best. “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
Thanks Tim,
I’m wondering if we should be preparing ourselves for a grand solar minimum rather than global warming. On my to do list is to get a log burner installed.
Fire bricks… and a wax covered correlated cardboard form. Just add cement and water. Let set for 90 days. And bingo…. something to keep a single room warm with through the winter with.
A chimney stack will need to be properly insulated through the roof or wall… and that can be bricks or metal. This might be the only way through the dead ahead Maunder Minimum for many in the north…. esp if no one is able to deliver gas, or the grid fails along with the financial system.
A sliver lining to the EAB infesting and killing millions of Ash trees in the northern US not to mention the American Beech trees that are now dying from the BLD. On 30 acres we probably have a 80-100 cords of firewood dead standing if you can take your chances with harvesting the 20-30″ dbh widow makers.
g. pic search: “ash tree eab”
Sad to watch..
btw. in terms of Am.Beech are the bur – nuts also a thing for human consumption or too tiny / flavor to bother ?
hm, the more compact cultivars (columnar or weeping var.) are also likely fruiting nuts !
I think my comment about the GSM is awaiting moderation (probably because I mentioned ger bal – wor ming)
On my to do list is to get a log burner in case temperatures plunge.
For people who want to get a good grasp of how ghastly and grizzly the Epstein rabbit hole is, this is for you.
But I wouldn’t blame anyone for wanting to turn away or avert their eyes—especially if it’s all true.
https://elizabethnickson.substack.com/p/i-am-thinking-public-executions-how
It really appears that it is all out in the open now… or about to be. Society absolutely needs to come to terms with the concept of protecting its children… or people will not have them (see China etc)…. and then we go into the darkest version of Idiocracy possible (esp where mass unchecked immigration is involved)
—
You can find that documentary here. At one time it was intended to be entertainment… but because it is now contemporary fact, I’m sure the producers would have no problems with it being mandatory viewing for people who are fearful of their children’s future.
Watch Idiocracy 123movies – Free & HD Quality
Watch Idiocracy Online Free, free download Idiocracy full HD with English subtitle on 123movies
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https://123-movies.vc/watch-movie/watch-idiocracy-123movies-17760.5300863
Idiocracy is from 2006, trying to entertain at that time. It is now 20 years later and the world has changed quite a bit.
If the trends the movie based itself on disappeared you might be correct about the world changing quite a bit.
However, what people would call “dumb” in 2006 would be considered average now. We even have official confirmation of IQ points dropping across almost all human populations in recent decades. I don’t think it is just about intelligence. We are seeing accumulations of bad genes simply because modern life allows unfit humans to survive and reproduce. Unfit people include people who are part of the underclass as well as Ivy League graduates with STEM degrees. Adapting to industrial civilization makes many people unfit for life outside of industrial civilization.
Sad state of affairs!
This is fascinating. Human writing goes back way, way further than most of us have ever contemplated.
Guest Bio
Irving Finkel is a scholar of ancient languages with a big bushy beard like a rhododendron and a longtime curator at the British Museum, renowned for his expertise in Mesopotamian history and cuneiform writing. He specializes in reading and interpreting cuneiform inscriptions, including tablets from Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian contexts. He became widely known for studying a tablet with a Mesopotamian flood story that predates the biblical Noah narrative, which he presented in his book “The Ark Before Noah” and in a documentary that involved building a circular ark based on the tablet’s technical instructions.
Check out the math and logistics of the story. (one of my all time favs)
This video you’ve shared with us illustrates the point that organizing the voyage of Noah’s Ark would have been a logistic nightmare. It would have had to have been bigger than the biggest modern supertanker to accommodate two of every kind of creature.
I doubt that Irving Finkel believes in the literal accuracy of the Noah story, although I have not read his book.
Irving Finkel thinks there had to be writing at the time of Göbekli Tepe (about 10,000 years ago) because of a flat stone, with three drawings on it. He believes that the flat stone was used by officials to certify work as meeting certain standards. He thinks writing may have been done on perishable surfaces, such as palm leaves. Because of this, we have no records of the writing.
Ammon Bundy is decrying government overreach once again. Only this time, his views align much more with those on the political left than the right.
Oregonians know Bundy well. It was 10 years ago that the rancher led the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon. Back then, Bundy and his group were protesting the imprisonment of local ranchers while also challenging the federal government’s approach to land management across the West. Bundy was arrested, jailed for months and then acquitted of federal charges. Along the way, he became a heroic figure in certain conservative circles.
Fast forward a decade, and Bundy now is speaking out against ICE and the Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement. Few in those conservative circles seem to agree with him on this point.
Bundy published an essay in November that defended the rights of immigrants and blasted the federal government’s recent crackdown.
After an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis last month, Bundy said on a livestream that ICE’s conduct “looks like tyranny.” Weeks later, Bundy spoke to a writer from The Atlantic shortly after ICE agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Bundy called the situation “sickening to me.”
https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2026/02/ammon-bundy-is-fed-up-with-federal-overreach-again-this-time-its-about-ice.html?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=dhfacebook&utm_content=app.dashsocial.com/theoregonian/library/media/638795165&fbclid=IwdGRleAP6CUBleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEeWqzqzL5gtzeBfAga5-riTXQ2RJ57F17_Kf-VN_dAaaEjRlosoVAv1ypiYuk_aem_QLjBdraPQc2cqAy73Rzocg
Sorry about the long link. This is an attempt to bypass the paper’s paywall.
https://archive.is/kv1ZH
Pro tip – Archive.is (etc) often gets passed the paywall. Used to work for ZH, but thats done.
Nice find. Good to see a real, well-rounded American making the news. Scared of nothing.
Switzerland to vote on plan to cap population at 10 million — FT
https://x.com/NewsWire_US/status/2021699679533064694
If we believe the UN population statistics, Switzerland’s population now is just short of 9 million. In the medium variant of future population, they forecast Switzerland’s population to reach a peak of 9,344,000 in 2051, and start falling then.
The number of live births per woman is only about 1.43, so the population growth is coming from people living longer and from immigration. The living longer trend will stop adding much to the calculation, because the population is already quite old. Immigration can be cut off, if desired.
All the nations of the world that are not outright dictatorships are owned and controlled by oligarchs. I see no democracy that works they are controlled by money. So far it is a light hand as automation, no AI, generates massive wealth without labor. It keeps factions left and right, rural and urban happy enough to support the massive contradiction of a values free, values disregarding system.
With robots and AI there will be even less need for voters. No need to government employ low IQ urban masses to vote democrat, no need to employ low IQ good old boys to k ill and d ie in the military to vote republican.
China seems to be teetering between dictatorship and oligarchy. A struggle that the common person does not care about and can not influence.
Europe has nothing. They are being cut off from the African resource they used to steal. They have none of their own. Good wine and cheese is nice but it does not make one a global player.
Russia is nice it is Christian but it is cold and a one trick pony gas and oil.
India no resource except maybe thorium. Lots of low IQ, low education labor. In three hundred years it will look exactly like it looked three hundred years ago.
Africa much like India but without the thorium but with some uranium.
South America lots of low IQ, low education labor some copper.
North America has some resources in Canada and some educated labor in Canada, America, Mexico.
It is cheap resources we need–energy resources, fresh water, and minerals. I am doubtful that low IQ is the problem, certainly not in the many areas you list.
The problem is more that there are too many people for resources. Not very many can get jobs that pay well, because we are lacking the cheap to extract resources we need, and there are too many people.
Canada has lots of fresh water and lots of hydroelectric in French speaking Quebec. Financed by the labor unions of Quebec for the benefit of the people of Quebec.
Notice that none of the “low-IQ” people felt the need to migrate to other countries for resources until the white saviors caused their populations to swell well beyond what they could do themselves. The “low IQ” problem was created by “high iq” people who wanted to “change the world” and enlighten the savages. If they were truly high IQ they would not have bothered.
Exactly. That’s the inconvenient truth.
IQ and ethical makeup are two entirely different qualities.
You have it completely wrong. All nations controlled by oligarchs are dictatorships. This is why I think only China, Iran (plus some minor countries like Oman and Malaysia) have their people’s interest at heart. There used to be Lybia in this list, and hopefully Venezuela will stay in it.
China?!?!? Where to begin, but lets start (and end) with the Uyghurs.
For the rest of the population… just look at the population’s desire to have children. The rest … sure. China… naw.. it’s done in 10 years or less.
Tibet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2y7n6jw5d0
What does the Laplace Transform really tell us? A visual explanation (plus applications) (20:24)
2,666,360 views Nov 3, 2019
This video goes through a visual explanation of the Laplace Transform as well as applications and its relationship to the Fourier Transform.
Trouble is, this isn’t about politics, & questions like, how can we run ponzi/pyramid schemes like our retirement-financing systems, without failure of confidence on the part of prospective new buyers-in?
Thanks for the link! Wish we were taught this clearly four decades ago…
I was a skeptic from day one . $ 100 billion wasted on making toys .
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2026/02/09/the-auto-industrys-gamble-on-electric-cars-has-turned-into-a-catastrophe/
Certainly in the West. But it is all a matter of price, and China’s small EVs selling in China at around 7k$ will make a difference. A relative in italy got hired to sell those (BYD) and they can’t keep up with orders.
They are time bombs. Burn Your Dreams… baby.
Anything Chinese … is going to burn you. For some reason my comment below didnt take, but there is nothing from China that is long term safe.
Canada just made an epic bone head mistake of accepting this China crap. They dont build anything for a profit. All companies are 51% minimum government owned… and they are also a military. They want data, they want markets, and most of all they want dominance.
Everything battery powered is a loss maker in China. They dont need the product, so lets get a silly chump like Canada to take it all… and call it luxury.
I agree. They are dangerous and unreliable. But your memory is perhaps short. Both my uncles killed someone with their car, and a grand aunt was also killed while pedaling. these were all fiat 500 or equivalents from Bianchi or Innocenti. those were the years of Italy’s great economic expansion. cars were always dangerous. this is fine, I will take dangerous unreliable locomotion.
locomotion was probably never reliable. How many humans have been trampled by beasts of burden during the times before industrialization?
When your people succeed is is because they are superior, when the others succeed it is because they are cheating. For a long time, many white men thought capitalism was a white thing…to this day many are in shock that another race could possibly be good at it.
U.S. and European firms have received plenty of government subsidies’ and protection . The difference is they failed .”Chinese” firms seem to be able to compete in a global market even with government help.
Quality was never a priority with Evs. Stop being petty.
I agree. Keep in mind that Chinese engineering is amazing, and the best in the world. JK talks as if we are still in the 1990s.
The problem for people in the west, is that they are encouraged to concentrate on the low quality shit our corporations order rather than the true range on offer and then like the herd animals they are, they bleat about the poor quality and point the finger of blame at China, rather than the corporations that deliberately ordered shit, because they know the herd will buy, again and again(what do they expect buying shit), whatever the screen directs them towards. Point out China can make the highest spec at reasonable prices if only someone ordered that and they don’t want to talk to you anymore(no bad thing).
Dont forget… if you watch anything out of China… its through the prism of the propaganda machine.
It all looks amazing… until you go there. For me, its been a few years now… and dont get me wrong. There are things I really liked about China… but tofu dredge is a term for a reason.
Like I have not been in Shenzhen, and compared it to any Western city. Or traveled on one of their bullet trains. My daughter went independently, same impression, and this was in 2015.
“The delusionists and some test takers will support the stirvers but I am afraid these test taking automata are unlikely to develop the devices the delusionists desire. Their aim is to get cushy jobs, draw huge salaries and live more or less comfortably, or , in other words, just take up space and crowd those who actually do have ability out.”
You’ve just described the US, UK & EU perfectly.
Embarrassing isn’t it?
I have a habit to irritate all EV dealers . I pose as a father looking for a eco friendly EV for my daughter . All salespeople pounce on me . I listen their BS and stuff . Then I tell them don’t lie , I have forgotten more about the auto industry then you will learn . They get an education on ” peak oil ” and other matters that we discuss routinely here . Then they open up . Believe me drb , in Belgium the situation for EV sales is a mess . The brands I have visited are MG , BYD, XiPeng and Nio . From the European brands all Stellantis and VW group and ofcourse Tesla . Not the high ends Mercedese , BMW . I have an old associate in NL who I guided to use the strategy . When we exchange notes we are ROFL . Been doing this since 2023 .
P.S ; I do not talk with the hybrid guys only pure EV .
Price sounds great!
We had the opportunity to try something new with electric cars. Annnnnnd, instead… we built the same damned thing.
What a waste of an opportunity to reinvent our system. I blame Tesla. Instead of innovation pacing a new path, we get… same same, but different.
Given that recent example of Cuba w.out oil now..
No carz on street anymore, ..creepy.
Well, perhaps “we can / had to” brutally downsize at some point ( reverse clock as it were ) as also suggested at Surplus commentariat – they mentioned going preferably back to that combo river – canal and rail system.. The national-regional cargo throughput would be downsized during bumpy crash-y period quite lower anyway.. so perhaps feasible in some regional settings. The old canals and rail tracks have been maintained-repaired by ~smallish coal-steam driven excavator-diggers and or hand tools..back then.
Reusing the existing asphalt for lesser throughput and tiny roads instead as in additionally you could have el. assisted cargo bi/tri/-cycles and various rickshaws, but that’s ALL produced in Asia (e:/ bike part factories of TW + CHN) within CNC hitec manufacturing hubs; how long this manuf output would last and maintaining exports overseas?
Yes, most likely will not happen like that just musings about fractional energy throughput (cargo+indiv) mobility already known to us..
fl=pl&fe=cm
Zharkova vs Keicar 4WD lifted
( another option )
Cuba didn’t have many vehicles on the streets back when my husband and I visited the island in 2015. This photo was taken not far from Havana.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/example-of-road-2-adj.jpg
The paved roads were beautiful however. We saw rice spread out on one of the paved roads to dry.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/rice-on-road-adj.jpg
Historically, say for example the FR, had on/off relationship with domestic production of EVs as the technology ssslllooowwwllllyyy progressed for many decades already. There was notable jump in interest with the nickle cadmium batteries, but no full commitment yet. Then came the Calif boyz using thousands of commoditized small lithium cells for electronics and AC drivetrain, then capital poured in start-ups, and suddenly MANIA got into “big auto” as well.
Their #1 key miss-conception was to approach it as the batts are supposedly NOWish ready to fully replace the gas/diesel tank in energy density and refueling comfort.
Which was obviously NOT true by a long shot, and they ALL could have called to any highschool teacher to explain that to them under 5minutes..
Public was left to discovery these points the hard way.
Instead the value always was (at this stage of science tech) in plugin hybrids with smallish say ~20-35kWh size batt pack max, so you are good daily for ALL city commuting and a bit of highway route as well. And this obviously put into SUV or pickup, or minivan-bus form factor ONLY..
This has been (pre)known and debated in tech / econ circles for ages.
ps Stellantis went boldly into larger formats like Jeep GrandCherokee and Wrangler pickup PHEVs – even though with not the best batt chem – but appreciated.. great move (not big market understandably);
nevertheless the best PHEV pickup is CHN now anyway, before Sir Ratcliffe updates the first gen of his INEOS line up..
Even if the manufacturers do this:
To start the recovery process, the manufacturers will have to persuade governments to stop imposing ridiculous top-down targets that only distort the market. They will have to ruthlessly get rid of units that don’t make any money. They will have to wean themselves off subsidies and, most crucially, they will need to reconnect with their customers, making cars that people can afford and want to drive again.
They still cannot fix the situation. We don’t have the cheap materials to make inexpensive cars any more, of any kind. China is selling its cars at below cost, I am afraid. And we are lacking the cheap coal that they have been using.
Something we are all aware of. Problem of inadequate electrical grid exists in many places.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Electricity-Demand-Is-SurgingThe-Grid-Isnt-Ready.html
International Energy Agency says global electricity demand is growing at its fastest pace in 15 years, set to rise more than 3.5% annually through 2030.
While renewables, nuclear, and natural gas are expanding rapidly, grid infrastructure is becoming the key bottleneck, with over 2,500 GW of power and load projects stuck in connection queues worldwide.
Grid investment must rise about 50% above current levels to keep pace, with BloombergNEF and Goldman Sachs warning that persistent grid constraints could trigger power shortages and even undermine the U.S. position in the global AI race.
—–
In the U.S. specifically, the aging grid infrastructure in key regional U.S. markets cannot cope with all requests, with grid investments lagging behind soaring power demand.
At the current rate of interconnection requests and grid capacity, the U.S. could face a power crunch by 2030, Samantha Dart, Goldman Sachs’ co-head of global commodities research, said at a conference last month.
Kevin notes that 1W of nuclear power costs 2 bucks in China, 4 in France (not bad by western standards), and 15 in the USA. So Gail’s concerns about EROI should really be formulated using Chinese benchmarks. Yes there is the supply problem but I think breeders plus MOX are a solution for at least 50 years. Kulm will certainly discuss how the Chinese don’t produce anything, but it is easier and easier to rebut that.
This is a very good video, as far as it goes. US costs for building a reactor have become absolutely absurd.
But the issues I have complained about, the lack of actual mined uranium, and the upgrading to the level needed by power plants, still exists. You say that breeders plus MOX are a solution for at least 50 years. But they are not actually in place, especially in the US. I expect diesel is needed to make them work.
Also, the price of uranium does not stay high enough, for long enough, to encourage very much new production. And when new production is started, it takes many years to get the mine into operational status.
They are in place in Eurasia, and part and parcel of beating the empire.. One note since I was associated to the business: perhaps the lowest hanging fruit in reducing costs in the USA is streamlining nuclear waste disposal. Plenty of viable sites,
Well, the “Euroasian” case is specific in the sense (apart from many NPPs on the grid), they ALSO have to run legacy ice-braker fleet (n-power), and various mil systems in this regard chiefly (n-power subs), .. so in total there is a large – regular y/y stream of spent fuel, which goes to some temporary cool off storage and then reprocess, then to Breeder(s)..
From the above it’s apparent why it makes ~sense only to very few countries.
As mentioned before, the real energy brake through would have to come from another / novel angle :
renewables backed by cheap batt yet w. drastically longer cycle life; and or perhaps more likely fusion (CHN) or something not in our view at the moment..
Solar does not work for heat in winter. Batteries do not store enough heat, for long enough.
We cannot seem to get enough heat energy from wind energy. We have come close to building out what wind energy is available at reason able cost. In fact, we have somewhat overbuilt, relative to the amazing amount of transmission lines that would be needed to support the wind. We see reports that England is paying Scotland to keep some of its wind energy off the grid because the grid in England is not up to the task of accepting it, except when local generation is very low.
There is also the detail that minerals we need for greatly ramping up electricity transmission, wind turbines, and solar panels are not available in the quantities that we would need to greatly increase their production.
You are correct, but as alluded above.. with long lasting batt (many cycles over decades) for few cents, you suddenly don’t care for the longish overcast or no wind conditions..
Obviously, that’s not how this world tends to work apparently ( as humans possessing such nice-tricks ).
If nuclear waste could economically be recycled, we could solve a lot of our uranium problems, however.
Yes, there are viable prototypes to quickly cool and ready spent cores. Accelerator driven system, or ADS. I note Russia started a new accelerator decades after their last one, so maybe they are after this.
drb I fail to see how cheaper product translates to better producer EROI to the degree that it’s any kind of societal game changer. Physics are physics. Is China benefitting from economies of scale vis a vis their nuclear power industry? Sure. But ultimately it’s just ponzi power focused on electrical power and production more generally, because that’s the Chinese MO.. China’s total debt is accelerating faster than US total debt, and it’s low wages enable low price product.
Because the whole chain is more energy efficient. Specially the waste disposal, as written above. This also means that a number of people at the DOE need to retire to the country and grow potatoes, if the USA is to be more efficient. Harvest them by hand too.
330 m people fed by hand harvesting
i admire your optimism
I am familiar with the Department of Energy, and I assure you that although bloated that bureaucracy is a lot less than 330M people.
The advance of Ai sometimes helps to recreate an ideal era.
Strangely, very few of them concern the current age. The creators are aware that the current world, flooded by peoples who do not really belong to civilization, is beyond salvation.
One of such is this
https://youtu.be/fjT4VO79B5U?si=sA0sgZjCoF80JhtK
(don’t ask me why the signs are in English)
There are automobiles, meaning it is the 20th century. Pierre August Renoir, who died in 1919, lived long enough to see automobiles.
The girl is probably based upon Andree Heusschiling (who was Alsatian), Renoir’s last model. At that time models were often the sexual partners of the artist.
Heusschling, born in 1900, saw the artist Henri Matisse supposedly in 1917, possibly earlier. Matisse was 48 at that time.
After Matisse grew tired of her, he sent her to Renoir , who had fled Paris when the Germans arrived near there on Sep 1914 and was living in the southern coast at that time. Renoir was 76, but that did not prevent him from using the teenager as his model, who often posed nude before the old artist.
Renoir’s second son Jean (Renoir had children later in his life) was fighting in the Great War, and after being wounded he briefly returned to where his dad was, and got involved with her. After the older Renoir died in 1919 Jean Renoir, who would later direct the classic movie Grand Illusion, shacked up with his dad’s last model. She changed her name to Catherine, to confuse those who knew her before, and briefly worked as an actress but fell into obscurity after Jean grew tired of her after about 10 years.
Such practice was common in the older days. Which is why I laugh at the Epstein clown show.
From Wikipedia:
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Around 1892, Renoir developed rheumatoid arthritis. In 1907, he moved to the warmer climate of “Les Collettes”, a farm at the village of Cagnes-sur-Mer, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, close to the Mediterranean coast.Renoir painted during the last twenty years of his life even after his arthritis severely limited his mobility. He developed progressive deformities in his hands and ankylosis of his right shoulder, requiring him to change his painting technique. It has often been reported that in the advanced stages of his arthritis, he painted by having a brush strapped to his paralyzed fingers, but this is erroneous; Renoir remained able to grasp a brush, although he required an assistant to place it in his hand.
I am not sure precisely when Andree came to live with Renoir, but he would have been in his seventies (you state 76, so that would have been 1916) and he suffered with severe arthritis by that time, so the only parts of him that would have gotten reliably stiff were his joints. I don’t know where you get your gossip from, but I imagine Andree would have been much more of a nurse to him than a mistress.
This kind of arrangement, was, as you say, a common arrangement between powerful older men and economically weaker younger women, and in many places it was perfectly legal and social acceptable. It doesn’t compare remotely with what Jeffery Epstein has been accused of doing—which I won’t hash out in this comment, but it is all over the Internet at the moment.
There was even a movie about this bizarre relationship
https://youtu.be/YXI7DnrLBQE?si=NLd-k_lkDRW4Gmsf
which omits the inconvenient fact that Andree already went through Matisse before ending up in the older Renoir’s studio, which is compensated by changing the start year at 1915, which would have made her 15 when she showed up in the old artist’s place.
For whatever reason, the French likes may-december stories. I think it is kind of in its psyche.
Dad shot daughter after ‘arguing about Donald Trump’
“A British woman who was shot dead by her father while visiting his home in Texas had argued with him about US President Donald Trump earlier that day, an inquest has heard.
Lucy Harrison, from Warrington in Cheshire, was shot in the chest on 10 January 2025 in Prosper, near Dallas.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyk917xy8no
I think they left out the life time of hostility and hate.
Yea, he’s the true victim eh?
It’s more of a general commentary about the state of american families. we do not discover this today of course. socio-economic collapse will fix that, but not immediately.
Generally, it’s likely a sign of reached summit, pre-collapse times and downhill trajectory next; as people more working and living trapped 24/365 inside cubicles or islands as it were.. (moreover corralled via omnipresent msm toxic perma campaigns).
Rather deep division about politics and edgy subjects noticeable within families in EUR as well. I recall decades away then it was more source of good heartened laughter about that crazy aunt, grand dad’s leanings.. (with their presence) etc. Nowadays, it’s often visceral – hidden, personal identity politics, de-stilled hatred.
Yes. Current elites will be held accountable for crimes against decency, against the family, and against the truth. and this bfore we start talking about usury.
People have been shooting close relatives for a very long time.
I remember a high school girl who lived a few doors down from our family using a gun to kill both of her parents, shortly after I went away to college. My mother said she had sometimes given the girl rides to school, when she had seen her walking in inclement weather.
The issue of conflict then was whether the girl’s parents had been favoring her younger sister over her.
just as well ”open carry” is not allowed on OFW
The internet allows people to remain a suitably safe distance apart.
thats a different form of lethality altogether
A certain delusionist here spoke about dumping all the waste to Jupiter, while never really explaining how. It seems in his warped world the wastes teleport themselves to Jupiter, I guess.
Ravi mentioned the Kessler Syndrome and Dr Sabine had spoken about it
https://youtu.be/8ag6gSzsGbc?si=sEZcvZZ7Vpr9pVf4
That is the end result of creating too many useless countries and enriching them to a degree.
Some time ago , there was a movie
https://youtu.be/o6qDpRbIM7o?si=UHHtnfbFt_R49kr9
about some Tibetan monks installing satellite dish to watch soccer.
The space was overcrowded by useless satellites so people in the New Guinean jungles could watch p*rn.
None of this farce would have taken place if colonialism continued and people in the third world were kept poor.
The Third World got too rich for the future of humanity and it is about to kill human progress. Thanks Gabby, thanks Chucky and thanks Woody Wilson.
I understand that high school projects from rich countries were put into orbit, too. If we are concerned about space debris, we cannot keep adding to it.
Are we running out of fuel?
UPDATE: In addition to El Paso, Air Space has also been shutdown around Santa Teresa, New Mexico for 10 days & New Orleans for 5 days citing National Security.
https://x.com/TheMaineWonk/status/2021549844632842705
Airlines suspend Cuba flights amid jet fuel shortage after Trump tariff threats on oil shipments to island
Air Canada plans to retrieve approximately 3,000 stranded customers as White House Cuban leaders to make a deal with the US
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/airlines-suspend-cuba-flights-amid-jet-fuel-shortage-after-trump-tariff-threats-on-oil-shipments-to-island
What goes around, comes around
Saves jet fuel. Islands are heavy users of diesel and jet fuel.
In this case, the Big New York Bully by the name of Don is picking on the little runt to divert attention from himself and failures.
We will pay for his indiscretions and poor decision making…like others that dictate based on their prejudice
Agree . He can’t take on the big boys — China , Russia . Did you notice it is always Donnie who calls up Vlad and Xi and not vice versa ? He is a big bully and nothing else . The world now understands his strategy — demand the outlandish and settle for the absurd . Iran has slapped him in the face and now he desperately seeks an off ramp . Meanwhile his MAGA support is weakening and he is worried about the November elections as his unpopularity rises .
He’s not really making these decisions. He’s just the fall guy.
Says a lot about a guy when he wants this to be his legacy.
Then, again, Hillary would behave the same if they asked her to.
They all would.
Add> another update on the ground situation in Cuba and the ricocheting effects of no oil ! Report filed by Galz from CodePink ( traveling there often ) , but the info is interesting:
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/cuba-suffers-under-oil-embargo
From the link:
Marta Jiménez, a hairdresser in Cuba’s eastern city of Holguín, covered her face with her hands and broke down crying when I asked her about Trump’s blockade of the island—especially now that the U.S. is choking off oil shipments.
“You can’t imagine how it touches every part of our lives,” she sobbed. “It’s a vicious, all-encompassing spiral downward. With no gasoline, buses don’t run, so we can’t get to work. We have electricity only three to six hours a day. There’s no gas for cooking, so we’re burning wood and charcoal in our apartments. It’s like going back 100 years.
People are energy blind, until that energy is taken away from them. Unfortunately, there is not enough to go around, now.
my neighbour and i have a joint water mains stop cock, which happens to be in his garden
there’s never been a problem with that—just a quirk of the original building plan…
now imagine if i had a really nasty neighbour able to turn my water off if i upset him, and there was no legal redress to stop him…
thats cuba’s situation right now.
America’s always behaved like this towards its neighbors. The current administration is just brazen about it.
The public prefers to be lied to about the situation and prefers to be told it is about containing Communism or fighting terror.
The public also prefers to look the other way, even the Cubans themselves, once they are on American soil. This is not due to intimidation, from what I’ve seen, but a case of “I got mine”.
The problem seems to be over.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/special-security-reasons-faa-abruptly-halts-all-flight-operations-above-us-border-town-el
Update (0950ET):
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed on X that the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of War “acted swiftly to address a cartel drone incursion” at or near the border town of El Paso.
“The threat has been neutralized, and there is no danger to commercial travel in the region. The restrictions have been lifted, and normal flights are resuming,” Duffy said.
German gas storage operators have already notified the energy regulator of plans to shut their facilities amid waning profitability”>>>
Germany’s Gas Refill Season Looks Tough, Market Manager Says
Germany’s gas storage operators are set to face a “difficult” stockpiling season this summer as it’s unprofitable to refill the vast sites, according to the country’s market manager.
“Summer prices are relatively high, while winter 2026/27 prices are more or less at the same level, so there is no incentive to buy gas in summer and pay for storage,” said Torsten Frank, managing director of Trading Hub Europe GmbH. “That makes it very difficult for storage operators to sell their storage capacities for the next year.”
Europe’s gas storage sites are back in focus after the coldest winter since the energy crisis led to hefty withdrawals in recent months. Germany is the region’s biggest gas market and also has the largest storages. Those sites are now just over 26% full, well below the average for the season.
Two German gas storage operators have already notified the energy regulator of plans to shut their facilities amid waning profitability, with regulatory approval for the closures still pending. The sites are Uniper SE’s Breitbrunn facility and Bayernugs GmbH’s Wolfersberg. (Bloomberg)https://x.com/chigrl/status/2021550647787622807
Germany gas storage is only 26% full . Barely enough pressure to pump .
https://agsi.gie.eu/
https://x.com/chigrl/status/2021550647787622807
Germans are likely to freeze in the dark if there is much more cold weather in Germany.
No government seems to be willing to plan ahead. Wind and solar do not provide enough electricity for winter. There is the belief that an LNG ship will come sailing by, and provide enough natural gas for when it is needed, but this is not necessarily the case. Storage is essential. Somehow, this storage needs to take place, regardless of the difference between summer and winter gas prices.
If most of the natural gas is LNG, I would not be surprised if most of it is high-priced, year around.
” Back in October, we forecast a European exit storage level of 20.9% by the end of March. Based on the latest weather data as of yesterday — with November, December and January now fully incorporated and limited moving parts left for February — our model now suggests an exit level of 16.8%. ”
Lowest ever storage in history . Winter start was 80% full .
This is a technical / financial post on the gas issue post Gazprom in EU . You can skip it , only for the buffs .
https://www.thecommoditycompass.com/p/eu-natural-gas-deep-dive-cheap-gas?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3177130&post_id=162467862&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=26quge&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
This is an interesting article, to me at least. It drove in to me how oversupplied the LNG market is today. I am sure that the companies trying to export LNG to Europe are already losing money. It more LNG production goes on line, the situation will be even worse.
Natural gas is something that you have to use, store, or transport to another part of the world where they can either use or stop it. But LNG today has limited uses–mostly heat in winter, electricity year around, and some industrial uses. Demand doesn’t go up quickly and available storage doesn’t seem to go up much at all. In fact, available storage seems to fall down, if there isn’t a sufficiently high drop in prices during summer, relative to winter. (This seems to be a problem in Germany).
This analyst says he has written about China also. This is a 2004 china article. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RRPONTSYD/ Much of what he writes is behind a paywall.