118 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, January 10, 2023”

  1. My apologies. I promised I would have a new essay on my website in a couple of weeks. That is not going to happen. There will not likely be any more essays at all.

    In preparation for the article, I read several books on belief systems or epistemology to determine why some people are so dogmatic in their worldviews. One of the books was titled “On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not” by neurologist Dr. Robert A. Burton. In the preface, I found this paragraph:

    “Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of “knowing what we know” arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason.”

    That statement startled me. But thinking about it, things seemed to fall into place. I knew that the book I had written needed to be completed. There was something significant that I had left out. I have decided to write another. This one will be much shorter, about 60 to 70 pages, and will be published on Kindle only. Hopefully for only a couple of bucks. It will be out by this summer, I hope. And it will, very likely, be the last thing I will ever write.

    But by concentrating on this short book and trying to get every sentence correct, I will not write anything else, even a short essay. I could, but I want to concentrate on this and nothing else.

    Ron

    1. Regarding certainty and science is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, science only really works if the models and theories are dead on certain, otherwise the belief is just a heuristic. Yet, on the other hand, certainty and uncertainty displayed by the scientist is a juggling act. The scientist needs to be able to stand back and cast a critical eye on their own work and results, while also showing stubbornness and persistence in their beliefs while facing adversity. Can’t let every case of uncertainty ruin one’s confidence, since nature hides its secrets well. How many scientific discoveries were easily made, without showing any struggle?

    2. I’m reading these comments and thinking about a topic I’ve been hearing about lately…we are all going to be soon flooded with with a growing tsunami of fabricated news, opinions and even ‘research articles’ generated by Artificial Intelligence systems that will challenge all humans to separate authentic from concocted.
      We have had a taste of this for a long time, and people are poor at dealing with this challenge
      -all of the content of the worlds bibles is fabricated
      -much of the ‘known’ the history of the world is based on falsification
      -and recently the voters have been told that the news is fake and the election results falsified…
      to name a few examples.

      The dam is about to break on this. Good luck figuring out what is real, not only in the past but even more so in the coming now.

      I just asked Open AI chat to write a false paragraph about Ron Patterson and the Absolutism of Truth
      “Ron Patterson, a renowned philosopher, has recently introduced a groundbreaking new theory of absolutism of truth. According to Patterson, there is a single, objective reality that exists independently of human perception or interpretation. He argues that this reality can be known with absolute certainty and that any belief or statement that contradicts this objective reality is inherently false. Patterson’s theory has caused quite a stir in the philosophical community, with some praising it for its emphasis on rationality and objectivity, while others criticize it for being overly restrictive and potentially limiting the scope of human understanding.”

      This fabrication took about 2 seconds to be generated.

      It will also generate false scientific citations, and news links, and video interview clips with experts if I ask.
      This is just the infant version of what will become a monster within the human discourse and collective mind… bigger than we imagine, so I think.

      btw- I just heard today that Microsoft is planning to add $10 billion as a prime investor in OpenAI

      1. Microsoft is planning to add $10 billion as a prime investor in OpenAI

        Supposedly to enhance its search engine Bing. Scary.

        1. Any of the big companies who don’t scramble to innovate in this field are going to be left behind.

        2. Artificial Intelligence algorithms ( Machine Learning and Neural Networks ) are largely the same as they have been for decades ( since the 1970’s ).

          The only real recent break thru was “back propogation” in Neural Networks, where you use calculus derivatives to reduce your “loss function”, error rate.

          Linear and logistic Regression are 2 algorithms of “Machine Learning” and is a standard part of any spreadsheet. I remember learning those in high school.

          That’s not thinking!

          We are nowhere near close to having computers that are actually thinking.

          They are using pattern recognition and natural language processing that have been around for decades.

          What has changed is the hardware, it is much much more powerful (RAM, CPU) and scalable (Big Data) than it used to be. And with the internet there is a whole lot of data out there to mine.

          ChatGPT doesn’t pass the Turing test. It’s just got a whole lot more data (Big Data) to look at.

          1. To a large part due to Joe and Jane sharing all, and I mean all, their info freely to the web… Starve the beasts as much as possible, would be my advice, making their job a bit harder at least. You know, privacy and whatnot.
            Addendum, got my daughter to read 1984 when she was learning English a while ago.
            FYI, this text was not AI generated. (or was it…)

            1. The only way to starve the beast is to not use the internet or your mobile phone at all.

              Good luck with that!

              Even if you could, you can’t control what others do, like uploading your photos, or conversations, or your DNA on the internet.

              Security and Privacy are an arms race and you are out gunned by GOOGLE, CHINA, NSA etc.

              The best you can do is don’t be the low hanging fruit.

              The idaho murderer was found thru his Dad’s DNA in a public database and then the FBI followed him on his phone including locations he had been historically, before he was a person of interest.

              https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11603641/How-Idaho-cops-linked-Bryan-Kohberger-crime-scene-four-students-murdered.html

            2. And don’t forget Dumb Ass Trump as the President walks around with an Iphone in his pocket.

              Exactly which Russian Oligarch has he been hanging out with that triggered the FBI? Igor Sechin (Rosneft)?

              I can’t believe the USA secret service allowed him to do that……….or did they want him to do that cause he deliberately skipped NATIONAL SECURITY MEETINGs cause he already knows whats going on?

          2. True Peak A, but nonetheless the capabilities are expanding quickly. Another decade the ‘progress’ is going to be hard to digest.

          3. On the other hand, the Turing test might be Alan Turing’s prank answer to a dumb question. All it says is that people who question whether a machine is really intelligent might not be intelligent enough to tell the difference. (This is my personal theory, I don’t have any source for this. But Turing did not have a particularly high opinion of non-experts in his field.)

            You are right that Chat GPT is just a chatbot. It doesn’t understand what it is saying. On the other hand, do chess bots “understand” what chess is? No, but they can still crush any human.

            I don’t expect artificial intelligence to ever equal a human. Why bother? There is no shortage of humans around. It makes no sense to try to build an exact replica.

            What we are seeing is that the tech can have massive influence on human life with just a little intelligence. A not very smart wasp can have a big influence on the behavior of much smarter humans at a picnic. In the same way, the algorithms in Facebook control the behavior of the users very well.

            Chat GPT can do some things really well. One is summarizing general knowledge in a field. I gave an example here recently. The internet is being flooded with AI generated blog posts already. All academic papers now need to be checked to see if they are AI generated. This is commonly done by another AI, leading to an arms race. Law firms also use similar tech to look for precedents. Chat GPT will probably kill websites like Stackoverflow that give programmers technical advice.

            Also image generation tech like Midjourney may never create great art (whatever that is), but it will definitely replace a lot of simple tasks like creating graphics for magazine articles, designing logos, brainstorming website design, creating graphic novels etc.

            1. Is ChatGPT no different than a summary of a Google search of a few keywords ?

              How else can it provide programming advice?

              I have heard that it’s effective but don’t know how it handles ambiguities.

              The other biggie is math Machine Learning for science. The only thing humans can handle are linear problems, such as

              A + B + C

              but that’s the tip of the iceberg, as non-linear problems take up the rest of the 99.999% unknowns in the universe.

            2. Aj kame upp vit a soylution, jost spel teribbel inn jor pusts en qeries…
              Might work in confusing the AIs? Wurht ah trai ; )

            3. I don’t think we will have a real thinking/learning computer until we come up with a new computer architecture.

              The classic Von Neuman architecture that executes a Turing machine that we all use, sends a sequence of instructions to a CPU.

              MOVE 0010010 11110000
              ADD 00100010 10001001
              MOVE 10001001 111000

              I’m not a neuroscientist but our brains don’t work like that. Neurons are constantly firing (being activated) in parallel all the time.

              They aren’t sending instruction to a CPU, as far as I know.

            4. An off topic……….

              Not only did Alan Turing basically invent the computer, he also played a huge role in defeating Hitler.

              If not for Turing we all may be speaking German. Turing figured out how to decrypt German communications so the British knew what they were up to.

              He committed suicide at age ~40 because he was being persecuted for being homosexual.

              What a travesty to an amazing human!!!!

            5. “do chess bots “understand” what chess is? No, but they can still crush any human.”

              Gary Kasparov (Russian Chess Champion) broke even with Deep Blue (IBM) after his first couple matches.

              (On a side note, Gary Kasparov wrote a book


              “Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped”

              that predicts what Putin is doing now based on Putin’s obsession with controlling politics with resources ).

              I have no idea what the state of AI Chess is but this is what it is doing:

              1) It looks at a large subset of possible moves (it at one point couldn’t calculate all the possible moves …combinatorics) , something a human can’t do very well (Unless ur Kasparov)

              2) Selects from the ones that worked in the past

              3) Keeps doing that over and over until it settles on a strategy that rivals Kasparov.

              It isn’t intelligent, and once Kasparov figured it out he adjusted and then won.

            6. Peak Avocado —
              Neural network software simulates parallel processing on a von Neumann machine. They have layers of neurons holding values, and weighted connections between layers. Information moves from layer to layer with matrix multiplication, which is basically parallel processing.

              It works better on GPUs, which are massively parallel computers designs to calculate graphic views of 3D scenes.

              The next step is probably the compute-in-memory architecture which moves the processors into the memory they access for calculation, making it faster to get the data.

            7. Alim,

              I am familiar with multi-threaded programming and how it spreads the workload across multiple CPU’s or GPU’s in parallel or it interleaves/time shares a single CPU machine. We wouldn’t have microsoft windows if you could only do 1 sequential process at a time.

              You still send instructions to a CPU or GPU even if it is many of them ( as you know software is just a sequence of CPU machine instructions at the end of the day).

              I don’t believe that is how the brain works. But then again, does anyone know how it works?

        3. They want to enhance bing because users don’t really use search engines to search the internet. They use search engines to answer questions. Also when you have millions of users, there tends to be a massive overlap of the questions they are asking.

          A search engine looks at the keywords users type in and searches the internet for them, and then
          uses a ranking algorithm to decide which web pages are most likely to be interesting to the users. Then the users go to the pages listed one after the other until they find the answer to the actual question.

          The chatbot can just guess what question the user is asking, and generate an answer. Since the chatbot is trained on the internet, it is likely to have been trained on the web pages that contain the answers users are looking for. Instead of working with key words, the chatbot can field the question directly and formulate an answer, allowing users a natural language interface and saving users time looking through the list of results.

          Whether the chabot gives the right answer is roughly the same as whether the page rank algorithm returns pages containing the right information.

          1. It’s going beyond this in creating programming source code snippets, which is similar to what the design automation tools are doing. Using natural language as a meta design language. Did some research on this prior and amazing how much progress has been made in 10 years

            https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270279820_META_Adaptive_Reflective_Robust_Workflow_ARRoW

            At the time DARPA had a competition trying to get an autonomous vehicle to drive across a California desert. No winners at first but eventually they got it to work, …. now they have them out on the public roads.

      2. In a similar vein, the images in the link below were generated by me using an AI. The subscription cost for the service is $10 for 200 images. Each image took around 15 seconds to generate. All I had to do was write a short plain English description of the desired image. Images closely matched what was desired both in subject and style. It was very, very easy to do.

        https://imgur.com/a/tHYUlVP

        If anyone would like to offer a short description of a desired image, I’ll generate one for you. Something like “man playing basketball oil painting”. I’ll post the results.

        P.S. Why can’t I seem to upload an image here directly? 1.63 mb PNG file.

        1. Niko,

          I am not good at we design, for some reason images larger than 60 kB cannot be posted here. I have tried to fix the problem, but to no avail. If anyone who is good at this stuff has any suggestions let me know. I have tried working with the hosting service, but they could also not figure it out.

          1. I’d be happy to take a look at some point, though not sure if you’d be comfortable giving a stranger the required level of access to find an issue like that. Don’t think it’s the kind of thing where I’d be able to suggest something useful without seeing the code. If the support team had trouble it’s likely I would too, but it is within my area of expertise.

            1. Thanks Niko.

              I have tried a bunch of stuff, nothing has worked. Think we will have to live with it I guess.

            2. Dennis, I think the problem is that the developers have stopped progress on blogging software. Lots of good stuff on GitHub which is what the developers essentially designed for themselves. So easy to post an image — all you have to do is copy & paste a graphic with no limit on size.

        2. Niko,
          Below is a 400×400 pixel copy of the first image from your link. I run linux (Ubuntu 18.04 LTS) on my laptop so I have access to the open source ImageMagick

          ImageMagick® is a free and open-source software suite for displaying, converting, and editing raster image and vector image files. It can read and write over 200 image file formats, and can support a wide range of image manipulation operations, such as resizing, cropping, and color correction.

          It seems that most people use the command line version of the program but, I prefer to use the GUI which allows me to see the result of each manipulation. I converted the image to a jpeg which reduced the size to 169 kB. I then resized it to a 400 by 400 pixel size image that turned out to be 39.6 kB when saved. The whole process probably took less than a minute and could also be done from the command line.

          1. Thanks Island. I can resize an image no problem, just wasn’t aware it was a requirement until Dennis’ comment.

      3. I am at peak cynicism right now based on the following:

        I got interested in linux and open source software back in the ninties and was exposed to the concept of spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) when a nascent product or industry threatens established hegemony (Micro$oft).

        I discovered the concept of Peak Oil (the oildrum.com etc) and witnessed the efforts of the petroleum industry to convince the world that “the Peak Oil Theory” was bogus

        Based on my new found awareness of the finite nature of fossil fuels, I developed a keen interest in renewable energy and witnessed a FUD campaign trying to convince the public at large that renewables can never work. The source of the push back was not clear at first but, over time it has been revealed that the interests in the fossil fuel industries were behind much of the misinformation (propaganda).

        I also developed a similar interest in battery electric vehicles, rinse and repeat.

        Most recently a long standing interest in nutrition based approach to health has been ignored/attacked by national and international public health agencies during this pandemic in favour of novel, patented prophylactics and treatments. It’s not hard to guess who would be behind such a roadblock to existing, low cost therapeutics in the effort to combat the pandemic. The evidence is in the financial results of certain companies.

        All along, I have been observing the political scene in places like Brazil, the US, the UK, Australia, France and others. I have come to the conclusion that those with the most money and influence have been fairly successful in convincing the voters of these countries that what is good for the most wealthy is good for everybody. Witness the rise of the right wing extremism. I am now convinced that “the truth” is determined by those that can pay for it (Murdoch et al). What is up is down, what is left is right and what is black is white. I continue to believe what I believe but, I realise that my beliefs are in some cases considered “fringe”. I’m okay with that and will continue to filter “the truth” based on whether or not the particular “truth” protects the interests of a long established, wealthy entity.

        1. The odd thing about the situation is that whoever is deciding on our future is determined to not do so, meaning that the important decisions always seem to be about choosing short term pleasure over any concern for the future.

          1. Sometimes one group’s thirst for profits impinges on another group and the results can be interesting. Case in point is the analysis of the excess death situation by former Blackrock portfolio manager Ed Dowd. In his new book “Cause Unknown” Dowd analyses the phenomenon through the lens of Wall Street including how it is likely affecting insurance company profits and how it will affect insurance premiums.

            Dowd was a guest on a weekly webinar put on by a group founded in April 2020 by some doctors that decided to focus on exploring treatments for COVID-19 (flccc.net). The prospects of fraud being perpetrated in the form of rigged clinical trials and the suppression of the reporting of adverse reactions to therapeutics is quite chilling. Of course Dowd has been fact checked! No surprise there!

        2. Thank you for a clear analysis of the mess we are in. I have also followed a similar path. I moved to my 5 acres in isolated hill country to grow heat and drought resistant food and herb plants without commercial fertilizers and biological poisons. I live a happy hermit’s life free of the stresses of modern society.

        3. IslandBoy,
          I don’t think you are close to ‘peak cynicism’
          You can progress to another level by applying fierce skepticism and brutal analysis to your own
          beliefs, bias’s and misconceptions.

      1. Thanks Eric. I just ordered it on Amazon but from a used book seller. I get most of my books this way. This one cost me $6.05, including tax.

  2. Humans in general don’t like uncertainty – it tickles the amygdala ( flight or fright response )

  3. Epistemology is a tricky subject, there are as many answers to these questions as there are philosophers.

    1. These questions? What questions are you talking about Dennis? Epistemology is the study of knowledge. How do we know what we know? Or how do we know what we think we know?

      Everyone has a worldview, but very few have any idea how they arrived at that worldview. You absorbed it from your parents, teachers, respected authority figures, and peers. Unless you are a member of a very tiny minority, then it did not involve any reasoning or logic. There was reasoning and logic, but that came long after you had already formed your worldview. It came in the form of confirmation bias. And, I might add, it is something you hold dearly. You will not give it up regardless of any evidence to the contrary.

      1. Ron,

        The dual questions of epistemology and ontology are intertwined. Worldview may be more psychology and neuroscience, no doubt there are many opinions on that as well. None of these are areas where I have any expertise.

    2. The difference in heating (forcing) in the Antarctic in the high insolation months between 2007 to 15 and 2017 – 23 must be pretty significant, at last a large proportion of the increase because oof GHG increases. All that extra heat goes straight into the Southern Ocean and is a feedback for more melting.

      (RIP Jeff Beck – him Walk Johnson, Keith Levene and Paul Ryder, all gone within the year)

    4. Different Prof Rees, couple days ago

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STJcyTRhYrI

      “Shermer and Rees discuss: existential threats • overpopulation • biodiversity loss • climate change • AI and self-driving cars, robots, and unemployment • his bet with Steven Pinker • his disagreement with Richard Dawkins • how science works as a communal activity • scientific creativity • science communication • science education • why there aren’t more women and people of color in STEM fields • verification vs. falsification • Bayesian reasoning and scientific progress • Model Dependent Realism and the nature of reality Fermi’s Paradox • why he’s an atheist but wants to be buried in the Presbyterian church in which he was raised • mysterian mysteries.

      Martin Rees is Astronomer Royal, former President of the Royal Society, Fellow (and former Master) of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge. He sits as a member of the UK House of Lords. He is the author of many bestselling popular science books, including: On the Future; Just Six Numbers; Before the Beginning; and Our Final Hour. His newest book is If Science is to Save Us.
      “

    1. SURVIVALIST, from your post:

      “The already long La Nina is unlikely to continue, tropical neutral conditions are expected by Northern Hemisphere spring, with continued warming as the year progresses. Thus, 2023 should be notably warmer than 2022 and global temperature in 2024 is likely to reach +1.4-1.5°C, as our first Faustian payment of approximately +0.15°C is due.”

      1. Reminder that over 35 years ago James Hansen was conning the gullible into believing temperatures would be 3 or 4 more degrees warmer by now compared to back then.

    2. Last statement from the paper-
      “which together with the El Nino warming will likely
      take global temperature to +1.4-1.5°C in 2024 relative to 1880-1920.
      However, we still have options for dealing with this matter on the longer term, as we will discuss elsewhere”

      That degree of warming next year a big ramp up, once again.
      Sounds like they are going to write up a geoengineering proposal.
      Who decides?

    3. the next El Nino is going to be the most significant event in the history of our civilization.

      1. Perhaps, cascading tipping points and all that. In any case, despite recent heat waves, wildfires and droughts, we have been spared the worst of global heating in 2022. The scary thing is that this La Niña will end and transition into the better-known El Niño, which sees the waters of the equatorial Pacific becoming much warmer. When it does, the extreme weather that has rampaged across our planet in 2021 and 2022 will pale into insignificance.

    4. Global temperature has been going up and down cyclically over billions of years, anyone doing unbiased research for the Earth Sciences knows about that fact.

      Examples;
      1. Skating on the River Thames in the 1300’s to 1800’s.
      2. Oceans so low it was possible to walk from Siberia to Alaska +12.000 years ago.
      3. Farming in southern Greenland in the 900’s to 1200’s.
      Currently we are going from a long term cold cycle into a long term warm cycle. Some people need to learn the differences between climate and weather and not let political desires get in the way.

      2. Yes Zooks, we all know that the earth has been an extremely unstable place…forever.
        But consider that we grew up quickly to 8 billion people during a period of relative stability,
        and we have now added an extra component of fast instability to the scenario-
        the big fossil carbon pulse.
        Its a very fragile position to be in when you consider that our food system is dependent on a pretty high level of climate stability, as one example of the problem on the near horizon.
        And also consider that a very high level of critical infrastructure in the world is in coastal and river flood prone zones- such as ports and rail hubs, pipelines and refineries, airports and factories.

        I understand that many people want to pretend its not a problem, just as many want to pretend that there is not an energy supply problem. Its inconvenient.

        Some are just starting to take this seriously
        From the – US Office of the Director of National Intelligence
        https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/NIE_Climate_Change_and_National_Security.pdf

      3. The little ice age was caused by changed earth albedo as increased population and migration led to increased deforestation and a brighter earth surface, the medical warm period was mostly a local event rather than global, probably from ocean current changes with some impact from reduced volcaic activity, we should be heading back to very low sea levels a we come out of an interglacial but increased CO2 from fossil fuel burning has short circuited the normal cycle and completely destroyed the holocene stability that allowed agriculture and civilisation (not a natural geologocal event but a happy coincidence where increased greenhouse gases from human activity exactly counteracted the expected cooling from glaciation cycles to produce an abnormally stable period, which the earth is unlikely ever to see again).

        1. Thanks Sarab, a classic (and amusing) visualisation of global temperature variation since 20,000 BCE.

      5. It [abrupt greenhouse warming] wouldn’t be such a problem if
        -there only was a few hundred million people in the world
        -all of whom were efficient at migrating to the most favorable areas for habitation
        -and there was no country borders
        -and gunpowder had not been invented
        -and the extinction of organisms who couldn’t migrate quickly to new habitats wasn’t any concern, as if humans were not dependent on an intact, diverse and strong web of life.

        None of these conditions are present in this solar system.

      6. Hi Zooks,
        Has it ever occurred to you WHY we know climate history past a couple of thousand years or so, back as far as we have written records?

        We know because the scientific establishment has provided us with this knowledge.

        So……… what you’re doing, in essence, is accusing the entire scientific establishment of at best incompetence, or worse, deliberately lying to us.

        The next time you need an operation, ask the surgeon if he or she believes what is taught in biology classes in med school.

        Ask any engineer you meet if he disagrees with anything he was taught by a math professor, or a physics professor.

        Maybe you won’t get it, but if you give up on fox and friends, etc, you will come to realize that when virtually everybody in a position to actually HAVE an informed opinion agrees on something, it’s true, with maybe one exception in a million.

  7. This was discussed recently.

    Makes sense to me but it would be good to know real world advantage.

    https://www.autoblog.com/2023/01/13/mazda-mx30-rev-reveal-rotary-engine-phev/

    85 kilometers of range on the WLTP cycle, and we would expect about 50 miles, half what the electric version can do. That’s not especially impressive, but it does seem that the gas engine will be able to let you go much further than the i3 could. Mazda didn’t give a range estimate, but the gas tank is a sizable 13.2 gallons,

    20% to 80% charge in 25 minutes( quite a range)
    R-EV weighs 293 pounds more than its all-electric twin(So an ICE is lighter)

    So Maybe you can go 250m nonstop depending upon speed? That would be a big plus.
    As Dennis said enough volume would lower gas use (diesel?

    1. It will be interesting to see how this is priced, and performs once it is released this year (in the US?)
      On range “overall range to over 600 kilometers (372 miles).”
      Its a small battery pack, with an efficient ICE that is used to keep the battery charged on longer drives and for rapid acceleration.

    2. I own a 2017 Chevy Volt and, indeed, this looks like a clone with the exception of the Wankle motor and very minor other differences. I routinely get about 50 miles electric range in the summer and 40 on the coldest days of winter in our very mild climate. “Cold” here is never much below freezing and if the temperature gets below about 25 degrees the gasoline engine goes on automatically. The gas tank is only about 9 gallons but on the freeway it easily gets 40 mpg so,fully charged ,400 miles is a breeze. For the current driving environment I think this concept is unbeatable. My normal driving is only about 120 miles/ week so virtually all of my driving is electric unless I forget to plug in at night or take a trip which hasn’t happened since the pandemic started. I never understood why this concept did not become the standard model for passenger cars unless it was that the Volt is a sedan and not the popular formats of #1 pickup truck and #2 SUV.
      And I’ll take a normal ICE over that rotary thing any day of the week. Mazda had to give up the rotary originally because of poor emission performance (rotor tip seals) and poor gas mileage. I can’t imagine their motivation to drag that dog out of the graveyard unless they have a lot of tooling laying around to expense.

      1. It’s an efficient charger, without having to be connected to the drive. Should be good for their margins.
        (In the big picture a drip in the buck t)
        The e-motor here generates 170 PS of power and delivers slightly better performance than the 145 PS fully-electric MX-30
        Talking about the new 8C rotary engine, an 830 cc single rotor with 120 mm rotor radius and 76 mm rotor width. It is 15 kg lighter than the twin-rotor Renesis engine seen in the RX-8.
        The new engine offers reduced emission, enhanced fuel economy, and improved efficiency at low rpm.

    3. Mazda rotary engine . Copy paste from OFW . Pie in the sky . Sweet dreams .
      ” With a gas tank of 13.2 gallons, the Mazda sounds like an ICE vehicle, with some add-on capabilities for using electricity as a source for operating the vehicle. If a person really wants an ICE car, but also wants a backup for a little driving nearby if gasoline is not available, I suppose this car would be an option.

      This car would not seem to be very dependent on a highway system of electricity charging, since it is quite possible to use gasoline and go. It thus has advantages over a fully electric vehicle that will be stuck if electricity is not available. If temperatures are very cold outside, and the car gets stuck in traffic, the gas tank could be helpful as well.

      Nowhere is price mentioned in the Mazda article. If the car is truly inexpensive (which I doubt), and operates as a person expects, I can understand why some people might want to buy one. With all of the complex switching between modes, I wonder if things go wrong. ”
      Things that make me go –hmmm.

  8. BLEAK 2022 CLIMATE CHANGE DATA: OCEANS WARM, GLOBAL TEMPS AMONG HOTTEST ON RECORD

    The science leaves “no doubt” about the impacts of the warming climate, Bill Nelson, administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said during a briefing Thursday. “Sea levels are rising. Extreme weather patterns threaten our well-being across this planet.” The nation’s two federal agencies charged with weather and climate observations said in 2022:
    • Ocean heat reached a new high
    • Arctic sea ice was second lowest level ever recorded
    • Europe saw its second warmest year on record, but much of western Europe was the warmest ever

    https://phys.org/news/2023-01-feds-bleak-climate-oceans-global.html

  9. Humanity will just keep growing like hell until collectively we just can’t afford to buy more….more food and building materials and electronic equipment and vehicles and weapons.

    There are about 7 billion cell phones, and 1.5 billions cars, and a billion small arms.

    Some people say that you can just print money, and so we can just keep buying more things…
    Its a little more complicated than that.
    Eventually global purchasing power will peak out, since it can only be divorced from reality for only so long.
    Just how much credit can be granted if your prospects for growth, income and debt service are poor?

    When growth peaks
    How does contraction first appear?
    I don’t know the particular trigger event. There are so many candidates.
    But whatever the hair-trigger, a financial system shock [overnight or in the slow motion of many months or even years] that isn’t cured by extreme efforts by the worlds central banks will be the opening chapter in the new era of contraction.
    Think of the 2008 GFC, except that this time the extreme efforts to stabilize the banking of the world are not successful.
    This is ugly, meaning that you might not be able to get at your financial accounts or cash at the bank, and credit cards are frozen indefinitely. This not only affects the individual, but also businesses, hospitals, cities and the government at all levels.
    If you think this sounds crazy its because you haven’t a glimpse of the history of when these things have happened before in other places.
    It does not take long for grocery and hardware stores to empty out, gas tanks to be dry, the grid to sputter at best case, and people to act as people do when the thin veil of civil order is disrupted.

    If things transition more gradually from growth to contraction you may see things like mortgages and car loans getting very hard to qualify for, interest rates getting really high…and then really low, gas and lumber and groceries and manufactured goods getting more and more expensive, people dropping health insurance or government health coverage becoming scaled back heavily, as examples. A recession that comes in deeper waves with less recovery in between, and then deep enough to qualify as depression.

    I’ll end here for the time being, but clearly there is a hell of lot of this big story to emerge as the global purchasing power peaks [followed by peak population].
    I don’t know when the human tide will reach its peak level, but don’t be surprised to see the early manifestations before long. Maybe we already are.

    1. Had a taste of this in 1997, with the Asian Financial Crisis. The Indonesian rupiah went from 2000 per USD to 13000 in the space of a couple days. Riots, lynchings, had to pull my team out to Singapore for a couple of weeks.
      People offering to sell near-new Mercedes for $5000, shops shuttered , people walking around in stunned disbelief

    2. Hi Hickory,

      You touched on some important points there. I think the powers that be will keep the illusion going for as long as they can, for e.g. through government spending and increased migration, GDP can be kept positive. The smart people will be looking at GDP per capita. Eitherway the data released, will it be real or would they fake numbers to keep the herd from panicking ?

      Who knows how it will play out, but as you said you can only keep the illusion going for so long, until both inflation, deflation and recessions come to bite hard. For now as long as the same genetic programming operates in humans, mindless consumerism will continue, resources will diminish and deplete. Until one day the earth will say, i have nothing more to give. (quote from the movie Apocalypto elders story scene)

    3. The interesting question is how long the denial can be sustained. Right now about 90% of the population either thinks that “the market” (right wing) will resolve any such problems or that “the scientists” will solve it (left wing). In fact the problem is only solveable with a massive reduction in consumption and who is going to be the first person in a position of authority to make that happen? Jimmy Carter got fired for just wearing a sweater.
      OK, that last part was an exaggeration.

  10. Republicans Want to ‘Phase Out’ Electric Cars to Protect Fossil Fuels

    In late December, Oregon officials approved regulations that would ban the sale of all new gasoline-powered passenger vehicles in the state by 2035 in favor of electric vehicles and other multimodal forms of transportation, joining states like California looking to ban the proliferation of fossil fuel-powered vehicles.

    Two states away in Wyoming, Republican lawmakers are looking to go in a decidedly different direction, pushing legislation that would ban the sale of all new electric vehicles in what lawmakers are calling an effort to preserve the state’s fossil fuel industry.

    Sponsored by Casper Republican Senator Jim Anderson with the support of several top Republican legislators, the resolution proposes to phase out the sale of all new electric vehicle sales in the state by 2035 to help maintain the fossil fuel jobs that underpin the state’s economy.

    Anderson told Newsweek that his resolution was intended to be a direct response to California and Oregon’s recent legislation, writing, “We need to support our industries.”

    “The proliferation of electric vehicles at the expense of gas-powered vehicles will have deleterious impacts on Wyoming’s communities and will be detrimental to Wyoming’s economy and the ability for the country to efficiently engage in commerce,” the resolution reads.

    “Phasing out the sale of new electric vehicles in Wyoming by 2035 will ensure the stability of Wyoming’s oil and gas industry and will help preserve the country’s critical minerals for vital purposes.”

    Legislation like Anderson’s to protect the fossil fuel industry have been a constant in the halls of the Wyoming statehouse since the decline of the state’s coal industry began in earnest amid the shutdown of coal-fired power plants around the country.

    With a relatively small tax base, revenues from sources like coal, natural gas and oil make up the bulk of the state budget every year, while underperformance in the fossil sector can often have calamitous effects on the budget. Research shows that per capita, Wyoming relies more on fossil fuels than any other state, making up nearly 59 percent of its annual revenue.

    1. Oh no, without demand from Wyoming’s vast population the EV industry will wither on the vine.

      Joking aside, it would make sense for these guys to address the state’s real problems instead of indulging in ideological masturbation all day long.

      1. Yep. The population difference and what that would mean to decisionmaking in the auto industry is exactly what struck me in the announcement.

    2. The rest of the world can laugh, but problem is that these people are deadly serious. We are attracting a large (for us) influx of what could be described as white christian nationalists to add to the sorting of nutters already here. They completely control the Repub Party and state government. Mr. Anderson presents the intellectual center of that group. Wyoming has gone from a live and let live state, to a cancer on the national body politic. Weep for us.

      1. Yes indeed.
        And courtesy of a rigged form of democracy the state of Wyoming with its 581,000 people gets just as many Congresswomen/men as does California with 39 million people.
        The result is that each Wyoming citizen gets as much Congressional representation as 67 Californians combined.
        67 times as much power in selecting a Supreme Court member, and the setting of other policies.
        Broken system.

        btw- Liz Cheney earned tremendous respect from me this past 2 years. That isn’t an easy thing considering her political underpinnings.

        1. You mean senators of course. Each state has 2.
          Wyoming has a single congressor, while California has 52.

  11. I just read an article about putting a server farm at a sewage treatment plant, so that the waste heat generated by the servers could be used to help run the water treatment machinery.

    I’m wondering how about any other such energy conservation strategies are possible low hanging fruit, given the current business and industrial landscape.

    A server farm could at least in principle be tied into a district heating system in a city in northern climes.

      1. From your link: There’s another way though. Instead of using electricity to cool data centers, a handful of companies at the forefront of efficiency are capturing that waste heat and using it to defray energy use elsewhere.

        That is total, absolute, unadulterated bullshit. Instead of cooling the servers, just let them get very hot, then use that heat to heat a building or something else. No, no, no… You must cool the servers, or else they will be destroyed. You cannot capture the heat. You must keep them cool! If they are not cool, they will die. If they are cool, then there is no heat to capture.

        While it is true that it takes less electricity to keep a computer/server room cool in the winter, the computer room must be kept cool. I spent my entire career, almost 40 years, working in computer rooms. If the air conditioner went out, the computer had to be turned off, or else it would fry itself. Fortunately, that almost never happened. Most air conditioners are very reliable.

        1. I don’t think they need extreme temperatures. The idea is to recover heat from water with temperatures in the high thirties.

          District heating is already widely used in Northern Europe, and a lot of different techniques are available. It isn’t cheap, but it isn’t impossible. It’s a matter of having the political will to stop burning fossil fuel.

          Part of that political will is the realization that it makes more sense to invest in energy saving technology than it does to waste money buying fuel. One of the oddities of the American psyche is simultaneously claiming to be the richest and greatest country in the world and claiming that there is no money available to fix the country’s glaring social and economic problems.

          Here’s an example:
          https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-62076634

          1. Ahh, now I get it. They are taking the heat from the air conditioner They are just using the other side of the heat exchanger. They are just using one side of the heat exchanger to cool and the other side to heat.

            I never thought of that, but it makes sense. Using their air conditioner to cool on one end and heat on the other. Thanks Alimbiquated.

            1. They may also be piping cold water in heat exchangers right inside the server room or rooms, which would PREHEAT the water for use in a following processing step requiring hot water.

              I’ve been thinking about using cold well water, which costs me nothing except electricity to pump it, to partially cool my house in hot weather.

              I’ve bought a big used truck radiator, and have a small quiet electric fan to push the air thru it, and the existing pump in the well will suffice to deliver the water.

              But this is a bucket list project. Maybe I’ll get to it someday. This rig up if built will fit in a four by four foot by eight inches deep box with a screened front and back. Plenty of room for it in an old bachelor’s house.

              There are some lumber processors who are using greenhouse type arrangements to get green lumber partially dried, thereby saving enough on fuel running the heated drying facilities to make this a profitable investment.

            2. Mac, I would seriously doubt that they are piping water inside the servers. There are hundreds of servers in a server room and that would be a plumbing nightmare. Also, a leak would be catastrophic, and just the condensation on the water pipes would cause problems.

              However, a heat exchanger is a brilliant idea. I am surprised that I did not think of it.

              Remember, when you read these articles an air conditioner, or heat pump, or heat exchanger are all one and the same thing. Down South, heat pumps are very popular and very economical. However the colder the weather the less efficient they are. Up North, and even occasionally down South, they require resistive heat as a backup on extremely cold days.

    1. This has a familiar ring to me. I started working in the nuclear power industry in 1971. We already knew then the the 1950s mantra “power too cheap to monitor” was a joke. I left the industry in 1979 as our existing nuclear power contracts had degenerated into a contest of who was going to pay the cancellation clauses, the buyers or the sellers, as both were scrambling for the exits as fast as they could.

  13. This company has been around a long time, and I hope they succeed in bringing back their semi custom built tractors…….. which are MADE to be easily repairable by any sufficiently skilled mechanic almost anywhere in the world, because the major wear and tear components are sourced from the mining equipment industry.
    https://www.agupdate.com/theprairiestar/news/crop/brand-new-big-buds-to-be-custom-built-for-farmers/article_99b41738-8f98-11ed-aa8f-bb25d2a25ddd.html

    Note that this leaves the company with only a minimal investment in design and engineering expenses.

    Mining trucks and off road construction trucks are built to run all day, and as often as not, all night, for years on end. They’re usually at least twenty to thirty years old before they’re finally set aside to be used as parts donors. Everything is designed and assembled from the first sketch to be easily repaired and or replaced.

    It’s impossible for an ordinary tractor company to use such high quality components because they’re too expensive to put them in a machine that’s likely to be used no more than a couple of thousand hours, and usually a lot less, per year.

  14. This link is worth the time to read it or skim thru it for the parts about the technology in Rivian delivery vans.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/14/what-its-like-to-deliver-for-amazon-in-new-rivian-electric-vans.html

    Note that virtually all of these improvements could be incorporated easily into a conventional van with an ICE engine.
    I foresee electric delivery trucks selling as fast as they can be built for as far as the eye can see, based on my opinion as to the price of diesel fuel and gasoline going forward in years to come.

    A lot of people believe electric cars and trucks will cut into the market for oil to the point oil prices crash.

    Maybe so, but my personal opinion is that depletion and the high cost of new production is likely to keep oil prices high for at the very least ten years and probably twenty years or longer.

    1. OFM,

      The 10 year estimate is ok, but after that we are likely to see oil prices drop as demand will start falling faster than supply and prices will need to fall to match supply with demand. The 20 year estimate is highly unlikely in my view, by 2043 oil prices will be under $50/bo and probably about $30/bo or less in 2022 US$.

      1. I hope you’re right Dennis.

        There will be plenty of essential work that may be impractical in terms of the costs of batteries and charging infrastructure.

        It’s one thing to cruise a couple of hours in a car using fifteen or twenty horsepower.
        It’s another thing altogether to run a bulldozer or log skidder or farm tractor with three hundred horsepower, or five hundred, all day, and maybe all night as well, using fifty to eighty percent of the max power available on average over the course of an operator’s work day.

  15. The energy crunch in Europe is providing stimulus effect for energy sources other than Russian fossil energy, including even photovoltaics in this cloudy portion of the world-
    “EU energy crisis: German solar power boom sees skyrocketing revenue
    The revenue could reach a whopping $1.45 billion in 2025, says a solar power firm [SolarWatt].

    This provides us a glimpse of how the incentive for solar deployment in other parts of the world will play out soon.
    Other than the other countries north of the Alps in Europe, no other countries of the world have such marginal solar reserve.
    https://globalsolaratlas.info/map

    The atlas is a great tool. You can click on any location to get detailed info, and even get monthly projected output depending on the size of system deployed, for example. Its sister site is a similar global wind atlas- https://globalwindatlas.info/en

    1. Sweden recently became the no 1 electricity exporter in Europe, to the new governments dismay, since they´ve been harping about that closing some old nuces was responsible for recent high electricity prices. In the process they were possibly winning the latest election since the general public know jack **** about it.
      https://www.svt.se/nyheter/snabbkollen/sveriges-elexport-slog-rekord-2022
      In Swedish, but in short, mainly due to wind.

  16. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/china-s-first-population-decline-in-60-years-sounds-demographic-alarm/ar-AA16q7ZJ?ocid=winp0dash&pc=WSPWWU&cvid=9af61b006fab4d6e8965c0143da570f3

    I do have a lot of respect for economists, at least for particular individuals, but as a profession, I’m pretty much convinced they have their heads up their collective ass they’ll never see daylight.

    That one child generation stands to inherit the built infrastructure of their country, and this means they can devote a huge portion of their work to looking after their elders, and still live as well or better than they would have with even a very slowly growing population.

    It’s hard to find even a paragraph or two written by a mainstream economist indicating that he or she understands elementary ecology and environmental destruction.

    Oh well, we might as well expect our local newspapers to run lots articles about the shortcomings of conventional cars and trucks. One of their major sources of revenue is ad money from car dealers.

    1. ‘Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist. ‘

      1. “‘Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist. ‘”

        I’ll take one step further and say that the assumption that any rate of growth can continue indefinitely once a system has overgrown its underpinnings is faulty expectation.
        Really, the only argument is if we have indeed overgrown our supply base (the earth).
        I believe we have far exceeded the sustainable level of extraction of energy, minerals and biologic products.
        Overshoot- Temporary condition that in our case has been enabled by a one time fossil energy boost, a myriad of technological mechanisms, and extreme financial engineering (borrowing from the future akin to a 200 year mortgage which far exceeds your earning capacity).

    2. As far as I know the only known recipe for economic success of the human enterprise is incessant growth, including growth of population size.
      Of course ‘growth forever’ is a faulty assumption in the world of real and living things such as animals (that category includes us by the way).
      So, the common stance for economists (and just about everyone else) is to see stabilization or reversal of overgrowth as a tragedy, rather than as a respite from the bigger tragedy- sudden and severe decline.

      Long, deep and recurrent recessions, labor shortages, lack of credit, declining purchasing power are all things that I consider infinitely more desirable than sudden collapse.

      China population has peaked.
      India overtakes this year.

        1. Islandboy , already overtaken several years ago . The last census in India was in 2011 . The govt was to do a census in 2020 which was postponed because of Covid . It is now avoiding a census because the political environment is not conducive to the ruling party . So no census till AFTER the elections of 2024 .Overshoot in full swing .

      2. The current population of India is 1,414,459,029 as of Wednesday, January 18, 2023, based on Worldometer elaboration of the latest United Nations data.
        The current population of China is 1,453,432,146 as of Wednesday, January 18, 2023, based on Worldometer elaboration of the latest United Nations data.

        Of course, people are free to select whatever data they feel will make their point, or just fabricate the data.
        Whatever.
        Regardless of the distracting chirps, OFM’s original point about a peaking China is a big one.

    3. “I do have a lot of respect for economists, at least for particular individuals, but as a profession, I’m pretty much convinced they have their heads up their collective ass they’ll never see daylight. ”
      OFM , the job of the economist is to make astrology look respectable ” . 🙂

    1. The issues raised are more easily raised than solved. But the democratic “west” has had several decades to think about these issues. I can not see that what is being done about it is too wrong at the moment. To dive down into many of these topics would take a PhD at least.

      1. btw- all of the years in the past decade have had melting far above the prior average

  21. https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/UK-Wind-Farms-Are-Producing-Too-Much-Energy
    “confirmed that between 6pm and 6.30pm on Tuesday 10th January, it generated 21.6GW in power – providing 50.4 per cent of the UK’s energy mix.”

    Every once in a while we have somebody post about the days wind lets us down. They never post about the days wind enables us to save up to half the quantity of fuel, and money to pay for it, when the wind is nice and steady.

    It’s going to be expensive up front, but in the long run, it’s going to be dirt cheap to build battery farms, or pumped hydro, or anything else available, to store surplus wind and solar electricity.
    It’s not just the savings in fuel.
    It’s also the savings made possible by offsetting the need for new fuel burning generation capacity.

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