106 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, January 27, 2025”

    1. The AI Hype left out that these algorithms have been around since the 1970s.

      What has changed is Moore’s Law, Big Data Architectures (universal 64-bit and cheap disk space) and an Internet full of training data.

      AI has not demonstrated a sustainable business model, and companies are paying out the WAZOO for the data centres

      1. https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=252731

        KD is always worth a listen on computing. He started one of the first internet companies MCSNet.

        He is a climate change denier. Just ignore that.

        He says DeepSeek changed their numeric variables from 32 bytes to 8 bytes therefore getting a 75% reduction in memory usage and processing.

        They also only load modules when their expertise is “needed” unlike the big monolithic AI competitors.

        The code is now open source, so the cat is out of the bag.

        Many companies are fooked!

        READ THE COMMENTS SECTION for TickerGuy (that is Karl)……he reveals a lot of this debacle.

        1. ”
          Training an AI on copyrighted material without negotiating a payment for that material is a FEDERAL OFFENSE and, for a REGISTERED work, it is a CRIMINAL OFFENSE particularly if it is done for the purpose of profit. In addition the Statutory Damages are sufficient to bankrupt ANY firm of ANY size, including the largest (e.g. Google, Apple, etc.) when said law is violated in this fashion as the damages are PER USE and six figures PER OFFENSE.
          ”

          Look out below!

          1. 8 bits you can only get 2^8 and a number between 0 and 255. Too small.

            32 bytes and 8 bytes is wrong I think. 8 bytes (2^64) would be plenty in most cases.

            From the comments section:

            “They rethought everything from the ground up. Traditional AI is like writing every number with 32 decimal places. DeepSeek was like “what if we just used 8? It’s still accurate enough!” Boom – 75% less memory needed.”

            2. The comments section is wrong about decimal places, it’s all binary. They probably mean eight bit instead of 32 bit. That’s where the 75% comes from — one byte instead of four bytes.

              Eight bits does sound really small, but the result of all the additions and multiplications of the weights is set to almost zero or one by the activation function at each node in the network anyway. The precision doesn’t get passed through from layer to layer. It’s the network depth that contains the magic, not the precision of the weights.

            3. From Ticker Guy (KD who wrote the code for an internet company MCSNet)

              “Oh its even worse @Steelpiston71; a big part of it was that apparently all the current LLM/AI systems were using high-precision floating point numbers for their weights — which makes exactly zero sense unless that in fact leads to higher-confidence outcomes.

              Which, because uncertainties are additive, does if you use parts of the model that make no sense to use — or does it? Well no because zero times anything is zero so…… yeah.

              Now THAT is basic algebra and statistics!
              “

    1. Government under the control of a nation’s worst or least-qualified citizens.

      1. Kakistocracy is a term that describes a government run by the worst people. It comes from the Greek words kakistos (worst) and kratos (rule).

    2. Seems to have several similarities to the broken Minsk agreements from quite some time ago, but broken by whom you would perhaps ask?

    3. Nobody is too focused on being right or wrong in the end it seems. It reminds me of a truce, Korea war style.

      Warfare is costly in all aspects like non productive industrial output to human lives and wellbeing.

    1. Although I didn’t predict this AI, it isn’t too surprising. GoogleMind shocked the go world with AlphaGo. Kejie, the best go player in China, cried when AI beat him. His mind was blown. But Chinese programmers recovered quickly and came out with several of their own powerful go playing AIs.

      But the shocking thing is the DeepSeek claims they only spent $5.6 million building their model. American tech giants are claiming they need tens of billions. A lot of that money would have gone into energy.

      In other words, DeepSeek is claiming a 99.99% efficiency improvement. That’s newsworthy.

      1. That’s largely because the Chinese are using the infrastructure developed with those billions of dollars, and are pirating the data with which deepseek operates. Nothing new here.

        1. No, the big cost is the chips and the energy to run the chips. That’s why NVidia’s stock got hammered today.

          DeepSeek will have used their own farm or paid for someone else to run their training. There’s nothing to steal here.

          On the energy side, one possibility is that they were piggybacking on solar Bitcoin miners. On the one hand the Musk side of the Trump presidency is pushing Bitcoin, but on the other hand Beijing is cracking down. Bitcoin miners have built huge solar farms in Chinese Central Asia. So if they have excess capacity that could explain the energy side.

          Hard times for Bitcoin miners could also explain where they got the chips. GPUs are use for coin mining and AI, as well as for their original use, fancy graphics.

          The timing seems odd though.

          About the idea that the Chinese steal everything from the West, I worked for Taiwanese companies in the 1990s, when they were taking the PC mainboard market away from American manufacturers. This is what I noticed at the time: It is often said that cheap labor is on reason why Asian companies excel. There is some truth in that. But it isn’t just sweatshop workers. Cheap engineers are the reason it is so hard to compete with emerging markets on technology. They aren’t better or worse or more or less prone to stealing ideas than expensive engineers, but there are a lot more of them. Put ten decently trained engineers on your mainboard project full time and chances are you’ll outcompete a company that can only afford two or three.

        2. Alimbiquated

          I appreciate the comments. Although not in the position to add to much, I would say it would be wrong to underestimate the intelligent people that must be behind both making the physical chips and also the software. Extrapolating expertise and knowledge. AI works very well in some applications though – just talking from personal experience.

          1. Apparently AIs are often used in thesises and such now, but also in research grant applications, perhaps one would need an AI to examine those to find them?
            Preferably a different one than the one writing it…
            (But on the other hand, if it´s a good idea but you´re a poor writer, it might be a good thing to use?)
            Interesting times for sure, have some NVIDIA graphics boards but no position, luckily.

          2. There’s really nothing novel or good about LLMs as they are. The Chinese ones being more efficient just means we can kill the private equity and venture capital firms dumping hundreds of billions into this stupid bubble to get rid of workers via shitty chatbots.

            NVIDIA is up today, but for how long? Literally the only stocks doing well are the Big Tech ones that are in on this crazy fad because they literally have no other growth potential revenue streams on the horizon.

  4. The ugly face of reality. Ugly if you’re an elephant, dolphin or human.

    COAL CONTINUES TO DOMINATE CHINA’S ENERGY LANDSCAPE

    • China’s thermal power generation, primarily fueled by coal, reached a record high in 2024 despite a surge in renewable energy installations.
    • Coal consumption continues to grow in China’s electricity sector, driven by increasing power demand and the need for a reliable baseload power source.
    • China’s coal imports and domestic production are expected to rise further in 2025, solidifying coal’s role as the backbone of the country’s energy system.

    “Coal consumption in the electricity sector continues to grow and so are China’s production and imports. The persistent growth in Chinese coal demand, including for power generation, goes to show that coal remains the baseload of China’s power system to back up the surge in renewables and will stay such for years to come as power demand jumps with the increasing electrification of homes and transport.
    The Chinese growth in coal consumption defies previous views that coal use is peaking in the world’s biggest consumer of the fossil fuel.”

    https://oilprice.com/Energy/Coal/Coal-Continues-to-Dominate-Chinas-Energy-Landscape.html

  5. “Accused of Sexual Assault, Drunkenness, and Financial Mismanagement, New Defense Head Is Confirmed”

    Trump people are put in charge

  6. Not one to stay glued to the stock market ticker, but NVidia’s market valuation fell by about $800,000,000,000 yesterday.

      1. Yeah, the market is very frothy. NVidia lost $1.2 trillion at one point, but bounced back.

        Deepseek claims it was using nerfed NVIDIA chips they bought for coin mining and stock market trading. Nerfed because the US government doesn’t allow NVidia to export the highest end chips to China.

        This reminds me of the 1970s when the American government kept gas cheap but Japan taxed it heavily. So Japanese companies built fuel efficient cars and American companies built terrible inefficient cars (The 70s really were the low point of American cars.) Then there was a oil price spike and the Japanese hammered the American car (and motorcycle) industry.

        Unexpected consequences.

        1. Some day the western world will actually learn to respect the Chinese, and others in the area.
          The disadvantages they have had relative to Europeans have been erased.
          Highly liked that they vast majority of the worlds AI enabled robots to be deployed over the the next 10-20 years will be coming from China (with and without weaponry options).

          1. There are certainly possible problems with AI, but it seems like the Chinese have made a very positive contribution here: they appear to have reduce the cost and energy input of their AI by about 1,000 to one.

            Ideally that’s what happens with lots of nations competing: they produce proportionately more value.

  7. “Let us not talk falsely now
    The hour is getting late”
    —Bob Dylan

  8. With respect to Trump’s taking virtually all departments to the woodshed: On the one hand all organizations – when not pruned on a regular basis the tend to accumulate excess fat – but on the other hand his clearly vindictive and red meat baiting way of going about things is not about increasing efficiency and effectiveness but about revenge and pacifying some of his base. So it is possible that at the end government may be more rational ( when closing ones eyes to blatant grift) and in better shape.
    Trying to be optimistic here so please have mercy…..

    1. Weekendpeak,

      It may in the end be good for the environment because the end result may be a Worldwide Depression, the $25/b prediction of HHH may soon come to pass, but not for the specific reasons he claimed, just from an unchecked lunatic in the White House making very bad decisions leading to chaos and a crash in the World Economy.

      This recent US election may disprove the old adage that Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.

      1. I’m actually impressed Trump is beating even my expectations in dismantling America. I know him and Musk talked about crashing the economy. I just thought it was going to be in months, not days at this rate.

        It’s perversely refreshing to see direct action so quickly form this way. Like the executive has remembered they can do stuff. Unfortunately, that stuff is “move fast and break things” at a national level.

        1. The rightwards lurch seems to be a global one, not just a US one. I suspect that part of that is driven by ever increasing inequality. Part of that is because of compounding – once you have some capital and invest it in something with a positive expected return you can’t help but watch your pile grow. The other component though is that the ones with the marbles make the rules so the table gets tilted and tilted more and more. I suspect that the combination of this is causing things to get a boiling point globally. And an uneducated and uninformed population only speeds up that process. Watching the pot boil over is not going to be fun.

          1. I wonder if the voters who put him in will someday realize that they enabled a massive escalation in the wealth gap. Perhaps that is expecting a little too much insight from that crowd.

            “Watching the pot boil over is not going to be fun.” Indeed.
            The confluence of kleptocracy, immunity from justice, AI disruption of job markets, heavily indebted government, and social media is an extremely nasty set up.

            “Kleptocracy (from Greek κλέπτης kléptēs, “thief”, or κλέπτω kléptō, “I steal”, and -κρατία -kratía from κράτος krátos, “power, rule”), also referred to as thievocracy, is a government whose corrupt leaders (kleptocrats) use political power to expropriate the wealth of the people and land they govern, typically by …”

            1. Humans seem to have a dynastic gene. It seems to me that a pretty fair way to level the playing field is to have a significant inheritance tax. We’re all born naked and for one person to have a crapload of money, with all the advantages that come along with it, and other baby to not have that advantage is fundamentally unfair. But – those with the marbles make the rules so it is unlikely that that that dynastic aspect of the tax code will be addressed by either party.
              The US does have to a fair degree a uni-party. Clearly there are differences between them, one is more humane than the other but fundamentally its about the haves vs the not-haves. Look at the isolationist tendencies of Trump I. Biden left most of the tariffs in place and by implementing the IRA is reducing dependence on other countries – whether you call than independent or isolationist is a separate question; it’s a good thing from an isolationist perspective but how does this help from a “building a global community” POV? Trump II is likely going to be even more isolationist (channeling Peter Zeihan here) . The US has less and less of a the need to patrol sea-lanes to keep oil imports safe, and as the US becomes less and less dependent for other goods from other (Mexico and Canada are the exception) countries the less of an incentive there is for the US to play local policeman. But is that good or bad, and for whom?
              /rant off

            2. I see things much the same way.
              I’ll add that the great advantage the US has had since ww2 with the dollar as the reserve currency of the world is going to be fading more quickly over the next 10 years.
              Isolationism, cyptomemes, tariff escalation, bully diplomacy are examples of voluntary measures that undermines the moat that has so very much benefited this nation.

      2. Dennis,

        Bond yields in China at or lower than those in Japan have absolutely zero to do with Trump. Auto sales in Europe being almost 50% lower than there all time highs has absolutely nothing to do with Trump.

        Global economy is absolutely shitty. The US economy while better than the global isn’t anywhere near as strong as we have been lead to believe it is. Over the last few years.

        Which is exactly why Trump is in office.

        The ship is going to sink regardless of what Trump does or doesn’t do.

        China is on the verge of an all out banking crisis. On par or worse than the US in 2008-2009.

        Can China handle 60% tariffs? Hell no!!!
        China also can’t agree to what Trump sees as leveling the playing field.

        1. HHH,

          Yes current conditions likely have little to do with Trump. I expect his policies will make the World Economy far less strong. We will see.

          1. Dennis,

            I’ve been trying to hammer home the idea that the strengthening dollar is energy related for well over two years.

            Central banks don’t control the money supply. Commercial banks control the money supply via loan creation. As long as commercial banks are creating loans it looks like what the central banks are doing works. Be it rate cuts or QE or anything they are doing. But as soon as commercial banks slow or stop lending the central banks are exposed as being powerless.

            The money supply has gone sideways for 2 years now.

            Have you noticed China’s stimulus measures aren’t working? It’s their banks that are the problem.

            Banks in the Eurodollar world can create all the dollar liquidity they want. But what prevents them from doing so is lack of expanding energy supply. Those bank reserves created by central banks don’t really matter. What matters is loan creation by commercial banks.

            1. HHH,

              Energy supply (or should it be consumption) doesn’t seem to be contracting though. It is at least plateauing and may do so for many years.

              So in your view commercial banks will continue making loans for years to come possibly. And keep the global economy afloat.

            2. Plateauing energy supply isn’t good enough. Not to repay debt plus interest. And that is the key point. You have to grow the money supply via credit or else the interest expense on debt isn’t payable due to a lack of dollars.

            3. HHH,

              Fiscal policy works much better than monetary policy. The real GDP per unit of primary energy consumed has been decreasing for a long time. So the energy argument may not be a good one. Eventually there will be another Depression, perhaps in 2029, I don’t have a good guess that’s just 100 years from the start of the last Depression. There was lots of isolationism after WWI as a precursor to the 1930s Depression, perhaps Trump’s second term and his isolationist policies will lead to Great Depression 2.

            4. Dennis,

              What happens when you use fiscal policy say during a downturn and they spend say $4 trillion into an economy that doesn’t have any extra or surplus energy to use to create more goods and services?

              Oh yeah we’ve been doing crisis level spending for years. Even when there is no immediate crisis.

              Without more goods and services you can’t afford to increase pay enough to cope with increasing prices. Fiscal policy has made us all poorer. Which was exactly why Trump won.

              Using fiscal policy is sowing the seeds for the next crisis. Take away fiscal and I promise you banks won’t create new loans until the dust settles and all prices are much lower.

              Once you go down the road of using fiscal policy. You have to continue expanding fiscal policy.

        2. “The ship is going to sink regardless of what Trump does or doesn’t do. ”

          HHH. I agree with you in one respect….the global financial system and economy is in for a massive crash. I have believed that since a teenager in the 1970’s, and we have seen a few temporary glimpses of it since then [not so temporary and partial if you live in places like Haiti].

          But these are absolutely worthless prognostications without being able to accurately know when, in advance.

          1. HHH,

            This is the old policy doesn’t matter meme, bunk in my opinion.

  10. And plateauing energy volumes are not net energy. There has to be growth in energy volumes to offset the higher costs of energy. The net energy is actually in decline. Hence banks won’t make loans because they don’t trust the collateral which is simply the ability to repay.

    1. The net energy argument is a tough one. Even if the implicit assumption that it is taking more and more energy to produce energy the other side of the equation is increasing efficiency. The quantity of energy used to produce a unit of GDP is decreasing so the question really is whether the decrease in the energy efficiency of production of energy is greater or less than the increase in how we’re using energy to produce a unit of GDP.
      The second point – repayment – I think is more demand driven than supply driven. If a business doesn’t see an opportunity to deploy capital at a return greater than the cost they simply won’t.
      rgds
      WP

      1. WeekendPeak, .. both you and Dennis believe this ….”The quantity of energy used to produce a unit of GDP is decreasing”.

        Except real GDP does not count the inflation in asset values, which for fixed assets includes all the embedded energy in them, which is why the value of them is increasing as energy becomes more expensive. If GDP numbers accounted for asset price inflation it would be much lower and potentially negative, which would mean it’s taking an increasing amount of energy to increase real accounting for everything GDP..

        We know from existing information that despite efficiency increases it is taking nearly 5 times the energy to produce a tonne of copper, than it did 50 years ago, on average,(from S Michaux/IEA) as the grades have fallen so much, the mines are deeper, more remote and have harder ore indexes today. I suspect it is similar for gaining energy, when looking at deepwater drilling and fracking..

        According to Gemini AI… “Overall, it is likely that the energy required to produce a tonne of copper from new mines has increased by a factor of more than 5 times in the last 50 years.”

        1. Hideaway
          It’s practically impossible to reason with people who don’t understand basic thermodynamics and the limits to efficiency gains . I had a conversation with a Yale graduate who thinks he’s so smart. We were discussing Moores law which is not a law but rather an observation. The problem I expressed to him is our current chip manufacturing are setting traces one or two atoms wide so we’ve reached our limit on miniaturization. He assured me that we will simply go subatomic. I guess it hasn’t occurred to him that subatomic particles don’t have atomic characteristics. And of course is the little difficulty that the last time we tried was Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

        2. GDP numbers as reported on FRED are deflated by CPI so they take inflation into account, so yes, energy density per unit of GDP is decreasing in real terms.
          Technology and information keeps increasing productivity, especially when a larger and larger part of productivity is not physical but intellectual. There is tons of data to back this up.
          Take electrification for example – by going electric you can bypass the whole thermal to mechanical conversion which tends to have a low efficiency. So just by doing that, in those applications you are doubling or trippleling productivity per energy unit. When you add that over the supply chain, from trucks in mines to HiLos to electric cars the energy intensity per unit of production drops a lot.
          But that does not mean that I don’t think that resource depletion is a real and extremely serious issue – and one pretty much ignored by the main stream ( which is why I hang out here on this blog). Both can, and are true at the same time.
          rgds
          WP

          1. WP…. “GDP numbers as reported on FRED are deflated by CPI so they take inflation into account”

            Yes they take CPI into account, but CPI does not add asset price inflation into the numbers, therefore asset price inflation is excluded from CPI, meaning the CPI they take into account is not covering everything…

            1. The market cap for all US stocks is around $62 trillion. It’s actually about 3 times the size of the money supply. One might ask how is this possible.

              It’s dollars flowing into the US from outside the US. As Europe and China and Japan collapse before we do those flows of capital escaping will likely accelerate big time. So US assets will likely remain bid as the world burns so to speak. Which will give us the illusion we are ok.

            2. It does partially. Rent equivalent – what they use – is imputed rent based on housing prices.
              But why does that matter anyway? You can look at household wealth data and inflation if you’re interested in stock rather than flow data…
              I’m fuzzy on exactly which bone is being picked here.
              rgds
              WP

          2. Completely wrong W
            GDP is a measure of financial transactions not a measurement of real economic activity. You’re fooling yourself by using that measure in relationship to energy.
            A penny for your thoughts anyone? How about a quarter for AI? Why is my Big Mac 5 bucks? GDP is a garbage metric that is highly manipulated to make it appear we have growth when all we have is inflation and insurance and regulations.
            Secondary electricity is efficient only at its point of use but horrendously inefficient generating it and distributing it. If your not going to include all the costs related to it including the vast amounts of fossil fuels required in building distributing and maintaining it than you’re the Ostrich.

            1. Yes, we aren’t producing more goods and services. We are just paying more for said goods and services. So the dollar value goes up and makes it look like we are growing.

              Trade values can be at records while volumes are down and declining.

              And yes the trade data supports this.

              GDP has become a metric that governments use to hide the truth.

              Government fiscal policy of spending like drunken sailors doesn’t help produce more goods and services. It drives prices higher so we can pretend we are growing.

              It’s a no win situation. Eventually higher prices lead economic contraction because of affordability. Credit card balances at all time highs because that is the only way people can afford to live.

              But eventually the people have no choice but to cut back on spending. Not only that but start paying down balances. Which shrinks the money supply.

              Then employer’s have to cut jobs because demand goes down because people are buying less.

            2. JT,

              Fossil fuel use is measured consumption of fossil fuel in exajoules. Real GDP measures economic output adjusted for inflation. Weekendpeak has it right, you sound like you have never studied economics.

            3. HHH,

              Yes we are producing more when adjusted for inflation at the World level. Here is World Bank Real GDP data from 1960 to 2023.

            4. Dennis,

              Again you’re looking at prices adjusted for inflation. That’s a value metric. Indeed GDP has continued rising on a value metric.

              Unfortunately most data that is collected is in the value metric. How many dollars instead of how many units.

              If I pay you 25% more this year for oil as I did last year for the same amount of oil and oil was the only thing that counted towards GDP then we just grew GDP by 25% year over year.

              Now if the following year I paid you the same thing as the year before but for say 5% less oil. GDP doesn’t go down it stays flat.

              Those adjusted for inflation charts don’t tell you anything about volumes. Just values. You’re assuming that just because the chart is going up and to the right that means we are producing more.

              It’s another sneaky way we are fooled into believing everything is ok.

              Even though both Europe as a whole and China can show positive GDP it doesn’t mean they are growing and or producing more goods and services. Sure maybe they can show a month over month increase and call it we are doing better but compared to what?

              China is never going to publicly admit to the massive contraction they are currently going through. The numbers are bullshit just like the jobs data here in the US turned out to be.

            5. HHH,

              What measure do you propose for all goods and services?

              constant 2015 US$ seems as good a measure as any, but you can suggest the better measure you have in mind.

            6. HHH- “It’s another sneaky way we are fooled into believing everything is ok.”

              Where did you get that idea….that everyone is fooled into thinking everything is ok. Who is fooled. What is ‘ok’?
              And lets say that you are well aware that everything is not ‘ok’,
              what do you propose?
              Seems hard to stop, or change course, on a planet sized bulldozer that has no steering wheel or brakes.

            7. Hickory,

              99% of Americans believe whatever garbage they read in their local newspaper. And they also believe if their guy is voted in the economy will boom and we will prosper.

              Most of the data is goal seeking and massaged to get the wanted results. Therefore not real data or numbers. The truth is the US isn’t ok. And that is rarely shown in the data or by the propaganda mouthpieces. So the average American is absolutely fooled into believing a reality that just isn’t so. Therefore the average American doesn’t have the ability to make good decisions.

              Guess when the average American can no longer afford to go put his boat in the lake on the weekend. Or go to the local college football game. They will take notice that they were lied to about how well we are doing. Until then it’s blissful ignorance.

        3. Hideaway,

          The GDP in real terms continues to require less energy, asset prices are not a part of GDP, they never have been, nor should they be. Yes copper has gotten more expensive, it will be used more efficiently, recycled, and in some cases aluminum will be used as a substitute. The fact is that fossil fuel energy consumption per unit of real GDP has been decreasing.

          1. copper has gotten more expensive, it will be used more efficiently, recycled, and in some cases aluminum will be used as a substitute

            Absolutely. It’s worth noting that there are a wide range of substitutes for copper besides aluminium: tin in pennys, steel in downspouts, fiber optics for telecom, wifi for home low-voltage wiring, microwave towers for telecom (AT&T is phasing out the last of its last-mile copper), 48V auto wiring which reduces amperage and cable requirements, etc., etc.

            1. Dennis …. ” Land is not produced so it is not a part of gross domestic production (GDP)”, …..which is why real or any other type of GDP is not a good measure of overall prosperity, it’s a measure of transactions.

              Economists use standard of living as a measure of the prosperity, of people or a country, yet it misses the big picture as it’s based upon GDP measures and comparisons.

              I can remember back in the 1980’s when Japan was claimed to have a higher standard of living than us in Australia, with ‘median’ type people/families living in pokey little apartments in Japan, compared to the house on the 1000 sqm block in Australia. I knew back then that standard of living based upon GDP and GDP/capita were useless measurements designed to fool economists…

          2. Dennis, the price of land where I am, has gone up at around 12-15%/yr for the last 40+ years, yet this “asset” price increase is excluded from “real GDP”, yet it costs a young person starting out a whole lot more “median income” per acre, than it did 40 years ago to buy the same quantity of land.

            It’s real inflation of an asset excluded from real GDP calculations.

            Why should car price increases/decreases be included in GDP but land price increases be excluded? It’s an arbitrary line drawn by humans designed to show what some humans want shown, that’s it. Just because it’s been the norm, used by economists does not mean anything, it’s an exclusion that shouldn’t exist..

            It’s all just part of human hubris in telling ourselves we are better off, when in fact there is less per human as the population grows.

            It doesn’t matter how many times you put up a graph showing energy use vs real GDP, it’s the real GDP that is false, which is why a family of 4 on one median income cannot afford a median priced house on a 1/4 acre block of land in an Australian city in 2024, but a family on one median income in 1970 could afford a median priced house on land, plus could also afford yearly holidays, a car, a new TV, etc, etc..

            If we had used a real measure, it would show how median people/families in our modern civilization were really faring compared to their parents/grandparents, but instead we tell ourselves lies with made up statistics that show exactly what we want shown instead of reality.

            1. Hideaway,

              The answer is fairly simple. Land is not produced so it is not a part of gross domestic production (GDP). The increased cost of housing is included in inflation statistics. Part of the problem of people feeling less well off is due to increasing income disparities which can be fixed with progressive income tax structures and inheritance taxes.

              Some locations are very expensive, others are less expensive, where one chooses to live is up to the individual.

            2. family of 4 on one median income cannot afford a median priced house on a 1/4 acre block of land in an Australian city in 2024, but a family on one median income in 1970 could afford a median priced house on land, plus could also afford yearly holidays, a car, a new TV, etc, etc..

              Median Australian house size in 1970 was about 100 sq m.
              Median Australian house size in 2024 is about 248 sq m.

              I would bet the median family income will still buy a 100 sq m house.

  11. Maybe Islandboy can find some good news for us here?

    DAILY CO2 READING
    Jan. 29, 2025 = 428.02 ppm
    Jan. 29, 2024 + 422.24 ppm
    1 Year Change 5.78 ppm (1.37%)

    1. I can help with the good news on that-
      there is still 20-25 years before we get to 500ppm!

      Holy crap on that annual change.
      On the Annual Greenhouse Gas Index (AGGI) scale we are already at CO2 equivalent of 534 ppm. This measure include the relative effect of the other major greenhouse gases.
      https://gml.noaa.gov/aggi/

    1. Tesla sales were down 40% in Germany in 2924 compared to 2023, and a lot of that is down to Musk’s politics.

      Last weekend and this weekend there were massive demonstrations all across Germany against the far right, and Musk publicly supports German right wing extremists. The general feeling is that money going to Tesla pays for fascism.

      This all got a lot worse this week due to some shenanigans in parliament.

      Since people buying Teslas tend to be center left or greens, Musk has been attacking his own base.

      1. Tesla’s stock price is probably not of any concern whatsoever to Musk at this point in history.

        1. Bob,

          Tesla ownership is a big piece of Musk’s net worth so my guess is that it matters to him. He seems to think his title is CHO based on his recent earnings call (H is for hype). He has been promising full self driving is a year away for about 5 years now, only the very gullible still believe this. Owners of Tesla stock would be wise to head for the exit IMO.

          1. Yes, if only he would pause to consider how the optics of breaking the U.S. government might negatively affect the valuation of his car company. Next up: U.S. debt default.

            MAGA, MAHA, DOGE, RAGE (Remove All Government Employees). The acronyms just keep piling up. I suggest another: Make United States Kleptocratic.

            I really hope I’m wrong about the implications of what’s being reported.
            Who is John Galt Curtis Garvin?

            Hysterical? God I sure hope so.

            https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/21/curtis-yarvin-trump

      2. Alimbiquated,

        I recently read that Tesla sales are way down in Sweden and Norway also.

        1. Dennis

          Speaking about Norway only. Most car sales are down due to less VAT incentive to make a purchase. And maybe higher interest rates also play into the picture as car loans are common. When that is said, Tesla is a big brand name by now. It competes with very competitive priced Chinese brands, especially BYD. You have Volkswagen in there as a top choice historically with the best network of connected workshops available. Many when it comes to the older generation choose Volkswagen. No wonder sales are down overall recently as sales were rushed as a combination of getting the most out of the VAT taxation rules (similar effect to changes of subsidy rules most other places) and lower financing costs while it lasted.

          Most people have not had a Tesla for that long of a time period; they do not complain in general (one of first adaptors I know of had a battery break down, but it was reimbursed).

  13. We are at Peak Prosperity.

    All global GDP is based on a few cheap commodities, water, air and soil. Harsh farming methods are used to produce as much cheap food as possible, eroding nearly half of the best top soils. We lose 35 billion tonnes of it a year, what is left has to a greater extent been depleted of natural health giving properties. Farmer who have changed to sustainable farming practices find that yields are not quite as high and so their food is more expensive. More expensive food means inflation and less money for other things.

    Water depletion is an even worse problem, over the last 40 years India and China have exploited and poisoned much of their water endowments.

    https://updates.panda.org/the-58-trillion-water-crisis#:~:text=%22Water%20and%20freshwater%20ecosystems%20are,grave%20risks%2C%20WWF's%20report%20reveals.

    Globally in order to halt further depletion and poisoning of our freshwater and save food production investment Would have to increase by 800%. Thousands of water treatment plants need to be built to treat and reuse water on farms without further pollution. Dams, other storage and flood schemes need building. Even then desalination plants are needed and that water is not free, driving further costs for industry and farming.

    Who is going to pay the $2 trillion each year while food prices hit all but the rich?

    1. Do higher food prices encourage people to have fewer children?,
      or do we always just find out the hard and tragic way?

      Some countries have already reached peak population, Will decline be fast enough?-
      “As of 2024, the populations of 63 countries and territories have peaked, including China, Germany, Japan, and Russia. The UN projects that the population of these countries will decline by 14% over the next 30 years…
      For another 48 countries and areas, including Brazil, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Türkiye and Viet Nam, the population is projected to peak between 2025 and 2054.”
      https://www.un.org/en/UN-projects-world-population-to-peak-within-this-century

      I suspect that population projections will continue to show more an even more rapid contraction. One way or another. But the massive damage is already baked in the cake.

        1. Yup.
          Thats part of the baked-in scenario. Welcome to the extremely harsh scenario of overall contraction mixed with creative destruction and the extreme wealth gap.
          And yes….they will be coming for your social security and medicare safety net, one way or another.

          The only way that the US kicks the same can of elderly overload and labor shortage down the road is by encouraging young immigrants to come here. I’m not at all confident that robots to help with elderly care will be at all workable or affordable.

  14. “Yes, this administration is dangerous and cruel, but they are also shockingly dim and incompetent.”

    The good and the bad?

  16. “The U.S. imports more than 90% of its annual potash fertilizer demand, mostly from Canada, according to the Energy Department, leaving farmers particularly sensitive to any new costs.”

    Enjoy the famine. I recommend stocking up on hot sauce and tinned gravy; makes ANYTHING taste better.

    1. SURVIVALIST —
      Beef is still cheap. A McDonald’s triple cheeseburger costs less than $5. Beef is costs a lot of grain, so it is a canary in the coal mine.

      1. Why would the price of beef already be affected by tariffs that go into effect this Tuesday?

        The Muskovites apparently now have control of the payment system of the United States Government. I’m an ignoramus so someone please tell me, is the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) firewalled somehow, or is the security of U.S. military funding now compromised by Elon Musk?

  17. In case you were wondering………

    OCEAN TEMPERATURES ARE RISING MUCH FASTER THAN SCIENTISTS EXPECTED.

    • Another scientific study is raising alarms about the rate at which the world’s oceans are warming.
    • According to scientists at the University of Reading, the global mean sea surface temperature (GMSST) is rising 400 percent faster than it was in the late 1980s.
    • The scientists also estimate that the warming witnessed within the past 40 years will be eclipsed in less than 20 years without mitigation of greenhouse emissions.

    https://ca.yahoo.com/news/ocean-temperatures-rising-much-faster-133000658.html

  21. Gobsmacked by this video, The Energy Transition Is A Myth. (Turn on captions as the writer has a strong French accent.) The book More and More and More should be out in English in August.)

    https://youtu.be/-AxsZtwIhFw?si=ZGxHKyyWiSsa7sPd

    Money quote toward end: In terms of climate change, “you can only delay the problem, you cannot solve it.”

  22. Perhaps Hideaway and I share some common ground, but generally talk about it from differing viewpoints-

    ‘Herein lies the paradox of progress. A society cannot reap the rewards of creative destruction without accepting that some individuals might be worse off, not just in the short term, but perhaps forever.’

    The number of people in the world that have achieved a measure of prosperity over the past 150 years of the fossil, science and engineering age is incredible. About 7 billion people are pretty well fed each day and have access to electricity and are literate, and over 5 billion people have access to plumbing/sanitation. [I do not mean to diminish the incredible pain suffered by the billion who have have been left crushed amongst the gravel beneath the bulldozer as we got to now].

    But I fear we are on the verge of backsliding on generalized prosperity, having gone far along the path of diminishing returns on basic enabling inputs. Over the next few decades we are going to see backsliding- a lot of people are going to be left behind…’creative destruction’ applied to the human population. The Trump-Elon group think seems to revel in this prospect, hoping to gain power from the turmoil.
    Human beings have never behaved well during times of declining prospects, or even the perceived loss of upside potential.
    Most places in the world are grossly overpopulated.
    As HHH pointed out- is everything ‘OK’?

    1. Hi Dennis —
      So true though sometimes it seems to me as if Trump and Musk are working at cross purposes.

    1. This piece is not a statistical sampling, and does not reflect my experience here on the ground in Toronto. And my experience is supported by actual numbers from a Canadian Labour Congress poll*:
      Eight in ten Canadians believe American tariffs on Canadian goods will increase the cost of living and nine in ten believe it will have a negative impact on Canada-US relations.

      PS: Now that this has had a chance to settle in, I suspect

      In response to these threats:

      90% of Canadians support an investment plan to grow our economy, support Canadian industries and create good jobs.

      77% believe the federal government should retaliate by placing tariffs on American imports and 75% want Canada to cut off American access to Canadian resources like electricity, oil and wood.

      80% want the government to support people who would be impacted by job losses.
      Two in three Canadians reject an appeasement policy toward Trump.

      “This is a moment of unity for Canada,” said Bruske. “Political leaders at all levels of government and from all parties should listen to Canadians and understand that people expect them to stand united for Canada and Canadian workers.”

      And for the record, I hate watching hockey…but I wish I had been at one of those games (at least for the first ten minutes).

      *( https://canadianlabour.ca/canadians-reject-trumps-tariff-threats-new-clc-poll/ )

      PS: On sober second thought, I think that the “77% want retaliation” number is low. I think at least 15% of the “don’t want retaliation” group are people who don’t understand how tariffs work.

      1. Lloyd,

        It is an opinion piece obviously.

        The tariffs have been delayed for 30 days.

        https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/03/trump-canada-tariffs-trudeau.html

        Wow, there are Canadians that don’t like watching hockey?

        Perhaps Canadians are not all of one mind. It is certainly not the case in the US where under 50% of those who voted, voted for Trump.

        I think the tariffs on Canada and Mexico are a really dumb idea and it is likely that more than half of Americans agree (only about 65% of those eligible to vote cast a ballot in the US, we don’t know what the other 35% who did not cast a ballot think, but only 32.5% of the population of voting age cast a ballot for Trump and many of those may not have taken the tariff talk seriously.

        Note that cutting off US access to oil, gas, wood and electricity hurts the Canadian companies and their employees, so probably not the smartest plan unless there are ready buyers elsewhere. Electricity would be particularly problematic as installing cables to Europe would be pretty expensive, but export tariffs are a possibility for electricity.

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