105 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum July 19, 2024”

  1. “On Thursday Microsoft announced it laid off its entire DEI team.

    Then on Friday, Crowdstrike releases an update that crashes its users’ Windows based systems.”

    1. Oddly enough, guns were banned from the Republican convention.

      1. Whatta bunch of limp wristed, pinko, freedom hatin’ commies.

        I’d be giving out free samples of Colt, S&W and Glock to show my patriotism.

    2. Apparently the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

  4. I love our big, dumb complex system. When people say we can build back better with a vastly more complex system to replace the 100+ year old infrastructure we have, I shall just point them to the Y2K event we had today that happened because of 1 (one) company fucking up a security rollout.

    1. I was going to post some old “end of the world” songs from the 50’s and 60’s in response but I was actually cheered by how old the songs are and that we have somehow muddled through. I have anyway for a little over 80 years. It hasn’t been so bad.
      But in fact we are indeed on a path of self-destruction; increasing authoritarianism around the world, two less-than-ideal presidential candidates, runaway climate, plastic pollution even in our bloodstreams, disrupted economics….. on and on.
      To quote the Nobel prize winning poet/songwriter, we haven’t much choice but to just “keep on keeping on like a bird that flew.”
      Well, heck, if you want to despair anyway here’s my favorite end-of-the-world song from the 1950s:
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUfUAnqRJTQ

      1. Just playing Fallout and listening to the tunes makes me nostalgic for a time I never knew.

        But gosh darn it, we can certainly have a retro style apocalypse in the future.

  5. From the near the end of last thread….

    Hickory …..”Solar and wind have a good strong net energy return, when you put them in decent locations.

    Where I strongly agree with you, Hideaway, is the problem of intermittency. No question it is a big drawback. Most locations are going to need a big component of other sources on the grid to balance the supply, since there are few places that have a great balance of wind and solar all year long, all day long.

    Since fossil fuels have two grand drawbacks (depletion and carbon emission), we will need to take advantage of all of the other net positive energy sources in various parts of the world. Not a complicated notion. And it can/will be partially effective for awhile, long enough for you (us) to properly dispose of all of your processions and assets, and to decommission your factories, mines and toxic pits, if we so desire.”

    Firstly, solar and wind do not have the “good strong net energy return” that you think and most research on EROEI indicates. It’s because all the papers include boundaries of aspects too hard to measure, so they are excluded. Even the same types of research do the same types of calculations on coal and gas plants, they likewise leave out a lot of energy inputs..

    What no-one considers in any of the research papers, is the energy cost of the intermittency. They always turn to how much cheaper batteries are now than 10 years ago, so start talking future dollars, instead of energy to prove a point.. In fact every EROEI paper I’ve ever read, and that’s hundreds if not thousands, counts dollars spent somewhere in the chain to represent energy..

    My argument is if you are going to use dollars as a representation of energy, in some ‘bits’, then just use dollars to represent energy inputs, as it’s the only measure we have to compare all the too hard to measure separate aspects. We know how much a coal power plants costs to build, we know how much a solar farm costs, plus batteries and everything else.

    None of the research papers will use just dollars to show a comparison between all the different energy types, because renewables, with all the extra transmission and backup costs is way more expensive than a coal or gas power plant that can run 24/7.
    Nor is there ever a comparison between what we built the system with to ‘new coal or gas’, as the new builds are relatively way more expensive (we don’t have a future with them either!!), plus the ‘research’ never includes all possible capacity factors…

    Hickory … ” it can/will be partially effective for awhile, “…

    You should add ‘for some’, certainly not the whole world, all while the continued industrialization makes the climate, pollution, extinctions and ecocide worse for ALL.

    All the renewables come to a crashing halt very quickly after we have an accelerating decline in oil availability. It will be the massive inflation and governments reaction to this that cripples further investment in every field. Shortly after the older batteries, wind turbines start to fail reducing the maximum possible electricity going into grids, which makes operating them much more difficult and often impossible. The solar and wind installations around the world will end up being statues, many before the end of their possible working lives, as maintenance becomes impossible without diesel, parts become scarce etc..

    Of course if you believe we can continue along BAU lines for another 2 decades, with oil supplies growing throughout this period, dragging another 10% of humans into a modern civilized world, then renewables will be a much larger percentage of overall energy use to the detriment of the environment.

    However we sill still be relying upon oil in particular to mine and transport all the materials, and when the great declining acceleration comes, the fall will be faster and worse, with a much more damaged climate and environment for the survivors. The complexity by this distant future, will be way beyond what is imaginable now, based on computer electronics controlling nearly everything.

    Personally, I don’t think we have the oil to allow renewables to pass 5-8% of all energy used, so luckily for the environment will never get to a really dystopian electronic future that collapses very rapidly..

    In my opinion everyone discussing the future of renewables tend to concentrate on machines being used, instead of what it takes to make and replace all the machines. Changing the focus to the what’s involved in making all the machines, from the ground up, puts reality into perspective, especially if done without the hand waves….

    1. You don’t seem to realize that humanity is not going to forgo the opportunity to utilize all of mechanisms of energy production that they can muster, just as you have done in your 70 plus years.
      And yes…it will be enough for some, for awhile any way.

      1. In the long run we are all dead.

        John Maynard Keynes

        The problem with hand waving arguments that “it can’t last forever” is that without defining a clear time frame, they aren’t testable. It’s a strawman argument.

        Electricity demand is intermittent. Power plants run at low capacity. That has always been true. Current patterns of production and consumption of electricity are based on the traditional economics of electricity generation. They are not set in stone.

        The economics of energy is changing. The sky isn’t falling. It’s just that granddad is a little befuddled by all these new-fangled gizmos. I’m no spring chicken myself, but a little flexibility wouldn’t hurt some people around here.

        Burning less coal, gas and oil will result in a net decrease in extractive industries. That won’t “save the world” but it won’t hurt.

        1. The main stumbling block is the economic system in place anyway.

          If voting for more equal distribution of resources/wealth and higher taxation and more environmentally friendly modes of living worked, it would have been done by now. We know that the last time capitalism was in crisis in a truly major way, was the ’70s. And that ended up with removal of regulations, lowering of taxes, and a general move towards taking that excess productive capacity from labour to the capitalists. Electoralism fails because the combined might of the demos is meaningless when the 1% have the ear or simply the reins of power to hand. Don’t like the blue guy? Vote for the red guy. He’s still our guy, though, so we don’t care.

          There is absolutely no way you can enact reform of how we use dwindling resources while you still have this system in place. It will simply end up with more immiseration of the masses, who then turn to populists like Trump or Bolsanaro or Milei or Le Pen who have no solutions that don’t rely on blaming The Other. Because they have no actual solutions to the issue at hand without taking a sledgehammer to the whole edifice of the economy as it stands, which they gain from anyway.

          There needs to be a move away from token gestures like the Green New Deal and other paradigms that merely end up trying to direct capital in a way that looks more like it helps, rather than hinders, the planet. If you look at every suggested “solution” put forward from these mooks, you see it’s just another profit seeking con. There is no “make do with. less”. There is a whole metric buttload of “pay us for this service/product/lifestyle and we’ll give you a moral high ground with which to enjoy your end of world consumerism”.

          It’s to environmentalism what Raytheon putting pride flags on their social media is to the arms industry: branding a shitty thing to make it more appealing.

      2. Yes Hickory that’s true but what Hideaway is pointing out is it won’t work because it can’t work. There are hard physical limits to what can be done and even though we now live in a fake it till you make it world it will not change that reality. Civilization has never progressed from a dense low entropy form of energy to a diffused high entropy energy harvesting concentration system. It just isn’t going to happen. Meanwhile the fundamental knowledge base of the real people who build and do things is slipping away. The trades have been gutted because everyone thinks the future is computers and AI . The men who really knew how to build and run industrial processes retired 20 years ago. The new crop of 23-30year olds go to trade schools and come out only knowing safety regulations and employers accountability they’re worthless.
        As Hideaway always accurately points out entropy is times arrow it only runs one way. Frankly the futile attempt to reverse it which is what our solar and wind technology is trying to do can only be done by God. Adding complexity to solve problems caused by complexity is a fool’s errand. Meanwhile we are losing the knowledge base the built the present system. Which by the way is a classic definition of entropy which is nothing more and nothing less that the loss of information.
        That rule can be applied to the entire universe which in broadest term is huge information system. Even sub atomic particles such as quarks can only lock one way. The fine tuning of the galaxies and planets is so precise that any deviations would have ended its existence years ago. Everything we are this planet our bodies is made of the birth and death of stars that the result of entropy. That’s why we can look back in time and know there was a singularity that also had to have been the most organized moment in universal history. It was so precise that for 13billion years the universe has continued to operate and even today stars are being created at a rate of 60,000 per second.
        But something unusual happened here something very unusual. Instead of earth just being a diffuse lump of collected atoms it began to create ores. The geological life of planet earth with its molten magnetic core sort elements in someway that then concentrates in a dense enough from for people with low energy access to reach them. And that was just a start. Next came biological life in such abundance that we have yet to discover it all. Yet it was perfectly balanced to absorb waste and provide nutrients to support life forever. And if that wasn’t enough the geological life and biological life combined to create the greatest energy storage system ever devised. Coal Oil and Gas.
        Now will agree that humans are creative and there is a reason for that. But fundamentally we’re opportunists. We use what we find that has been placed at levels we can reach.
        And what’s out of reach will remain out of reach.
        A lot of people with science fiction backgrounds can’t grasp that fact you dream it into reality.

        1. There are a good few articles by John Michael Greer on the techno futurism movement and the leaders of tech being raised on a Jetsons like model for the world. Hence flying/self-driving cars, AI/robots and space travel to colonise Mars.

          They’ve been taking an L on just about all of these issues because they’re massive dorks who think 12-year-old them had the smartest vision for future society, provided physics and such didn’t interfere.

          1. I don’t know if you have seen Nobody Special Finance but he exposes the who AI scam for what it is in a three part video.

            https://m.youtube.com/@NobodySpecialFinance

            The fake it till you make it mentality is working its way through the business financial and educational systems. Look at Boeing.

            1. Added to my watch list, although I feel I’ve seen every permutation of the post mortem of what is to come by now. The Ed Zitron blog and whenever he turns up on podcasts is always eye opening as to how dysfunctional Big Tech is, our last saviour of the economy not imploding.

            2. In terms of AI and apps such as ChatGPT, when they work, they work great, but when they don’t, buyer beware. Like with many things.

              Also consider that CPU’s execute trillions of logic operations a second and they really aren’t observed to make mistakes due to an errant cosmic ray flipping a bit. Much of that is due to error-correcting and parity logic running alongside the software, and these errors are silently resolved.

              Then there’s CloudStrike. What happened there? A non-reentrant call locked up some resource that forced all the computers to be manually fixed?

            3. “when they work, they work great, but when they don’t, buyer beware. Like with many things”…
              Including humans.

        2. Civilization has never progressed from a dense low entropy form of energy to a diffused high entropy energy harvesting concentration system.

          That’s just ridiculous. It’s a dumb argument for one thing, because lots of things happen that have never happened before.

          For another, you are pretending to have an overview of all historical events and a definition of civilization so you can present a “big picture” argument, but you have neither.

          That kind of shouting and arm waving doesn’t do anyone any good.

          1. But we do have plenty of examples of increased complexity being the death knell for civilisations on the precipice of collapse.

            And the system you’re trying to replace is nowhere near as complex as the one being proposed. It’s like saying this silicon chip is a much better way of running things than those vacuum tubes, while the basis for creating such things is slowly and inevitably crumbling away. Did Friday’s cyber fuck up not ring any alarm bells for you? It should have. We could make basic electronics and combustion engines with Victorian technology. You cannot make the kind of systems being created now the same way. Imagine if TSMC’s fabs got vaporised tomorrow. That’s game over for modern technology overnight. Remember COVID practically paralysing whole industries (especially automotive) due to chip shortages? Make it permanent, see how well it plays out.

            That’s ONE part of the modern system that absolutely needs to keep going, and not even the most obvious one to fail, though if you want to see a funny story, read up on how fucked Intel is with what is happening to their 13th and 14th generation chips in consumer and server machines.

            Guess what also has not happened before? Doing all this under an increasingly energy constrained, globally unstable system that is enduring accelerating climactic shift. It’s like planning the move to agriculture just as the world entered the Permian mass extinction or something.

          2. ALIMBIQUATED

            You’re simply a waste of my time. Sorry to say.
            Your responses show a general lack of understanding basic thermodynamic laws. Go watch another episode of Star Trek

            1. Actually Star Trek has already got it about 90% right and it’s only been less than 60 years. Those computers on the show are already 20 years out of date. What’s your point(on top of your head)?

            2. JT
              Trying to play the old “second law” card are we? It doesn’t apply to open systems.
              I remember the Jesus freaks in my native Tennessee telling me evolution was impossible with the same bogus argument. Praise the Lord.

    2. In the OECD countries, which includes a pretty big chunk of the industrialized world, the percent of crude oil used for Industrial, Agricultural and Commercial sectors is less than 20% of the total consumption, and is likely not dramatically different in other parts of the world.
      Oil used in Rail, inland and offshore Marine transport comprises just under 5% the total.
      It will a very long time before oil will be unavailable for important industrial processes, such as building energy production capability, globally.

      What is a bigger constraint risk is the ability of all of these individual importing countries to secure oil products on the international market that they would like to purchase, over the next decades. US as guarantor of open seas/markets since WW2 is unlikely to hold indefinitely.
      It would be wise for all countries to develop as much domestic energy production as is feasible on an immediate basis, with the thought on top of the mind that the capacity to import energy could evaporate on any particular day.

      1. When oil gets to the accelerating decline phase, the distribution to where it’s needed becomes much more difficult. Exports of oil will decline at a faster rate than the overall oil decline. Do you think the Middle East countries will sell as much to export markets or deprive their own people more?

        Whichever answer probably exacerbates the overall problem. Depriving their own people, for export revenues, brings on the likelyhood of uprisings, which could crash oil production, while appeasing locals means an exponential decline in exports. Some countries will rapidly find no exports to purchase, no matter what the price they are prepared to pay.

        How do the importing countries go in such a situation where they ‘only’ need 25% of oil for industrial, mining and agriculture purposes yet cannot get any??

        It will not be a linear problem where everyone gets a nice slight reduction every year, that’s kindergarten thinking, and you’re way better than that….

        Some places will still get nearly as much due to political relations, some will miss out entirely. Because of 6 continent supply chains, all types of shortages will develop very rapidly, in a chaotic manner.

        Food distribution around the world will collapse at some point during the rapid decline, long before we get to the stage of nearly no oil exports on the world market, with farmers in oil importing countries having reduced production, and local costs of food, fertilizer and fuel skyrocketing..

        It’s an entire system that behaves in a complex chaotic way, that is energy hungry, requiring more energy just to maintain itself (remember lower ore grades!!). The sudden accelerating decline in the energy available, which is exactly what an accelerating decline in oil availability will bring, guarantees an unravelling of the complexity and links within the system.

        The scale of the modern civilization has brought energy savings allowing the population to grow. The unwinding of the massive scale of 6 continent supply chains, with everyone trying to produce everything for the local economy, takes MORE energy than the global supply chain, just in a period when there will be LESS energy available..

        What do you think the ‘growth rate’ of solar, batteries and EVs will be in the US now that there are much higher import taxes on these goods??
        This is just a harbinger of what will happen during the accelerating decline of exported oil available, which will decline at a faster rate than overall oil production declines. Governments will get desperate as internal economies decline, due to less activity with less energy, so will tax everything to fulfill their obligations, which also get cut back.

        In a declining economy there is less capital for investment in producing ‘new’ anything, especially as the oil availability declines or becomes non existent… When a local oil rig needs major maintenance of imported parts, because it was manufactured from parts in multiple foreign factories, but the specific parts are no longer available because those factories went out of business, the rig becomes a statue and useless. Likewise for millions of other ‘bits and pieces’ of our modern world..

        I take it you have never lived through a sudden shortage of something your business relied upon. About 25 years ago, our small manufacturing business had a breakdown in a hydraulic press and needed specific parts that were manufactured in Italy. We were basically told Italy was closed for summer holidays, and the parts were totally unavailable anywhere. We had to wait for 2 months for those parts, so had to hire different equipment at great expense to continue at all.

        As was proven on Friday, our complex system is incredibly fragile, and the more complex it gets the more fragile it becomes, as we rely more upon multi continent supply chains of everything, and don’t have the simple systems of old to fall back upon. On Friday we couldn’t purchase anything at the local supermarket (20km away!!), even with cash, as ‘the system’ as down so they shut the shop.

        Thinking that just because the important bits only use 25% of the oil, so everything will be fine, means you don’t understand the complexity and scale of how the modern world works and how fragile it has become, or you were just being facetious for arguments sake.

        I wish reality was different, but people that just want to deny this reality, by using simple linear thinking to explain away the predicament we are facing.. There is no answer, and it’s obvious that denial is what leads us to a collapse in the complexity of the modern world and with it, massive rapid population decline.

        1. “so everything will be fine”
          I certainly have never entertained that fantasy.

          “Some countries will rapidly find no exports to purchase, no matter what the price they are prepared to pay.”
          Exactly, and that is why I have said over and over that all oil importing regions need to develop as much non-oil energy capacity as they can muster, starting in the late 70’s. Still a little time left to do some work on the project.

          1. All the ‘effort’ is going into replacing coal fired power with renewables, and gasoline powered vehicles with EVs.

            The ‘effort’ going into replacing the oil as in diesel, for heavy transport, mining and agriculture is not far off non existent. The effort to replace fossil fuel products with ‘something else’ is non existent..

            Because it’s a highly complex system, with all the non fossil fuel energy capacity totally relying upon fossil fuels for every facet of their mining, production and distribution, once oil starts declining at an accelerating rate, the ‘growth’ in renewables, EVs and batteries will decline rapidly and/or disappear altogether, with the existing ‘renewable’ infrastructure aging rapidly. Within a few years of oil imports declining to near zero, the grid infrastructure will also fall to pieces, due to entropy and lack of replacements.

            Do you really think it is worthwhile to trash the environment of the planet to buy an extra few years at most of ‘civilization’ for a lucky few who happen to be in a country that built a lot of renewables, to only then also collapse like everyone else as parts, new products, food etc don’t make it to the population?

            I don’t think buying a little bit of extra time for a lucky few, to the further detriment of the environment, is a good trade off, but I fully agree with you that this is exactly where the world is headed, because people keep denying that we are headed for collapse no matter which way we turn as the human population is in massive overshoot, probably by at least 3 orders of magnitude, compared to what’s sustainable…

            1. Hideaway, your jeremiads are relentless and drive the brain into thinking the unthinkable. I would like to thank you for this, but it seems rather ironic . . .

    3. Hideaway’s problem, and position, is that any serious problem is, in his head at least, a deal killer, a reason to simply give up and quit… because such ACTIONS as he proposes are non starters, period.

      So we have an intermittency problem.

      Well, let’s act like we have at least a little bit of common sense, and look at it from the point of solving it, if we can, and if we can’t, making the best of it we can.

      I have semiliterate neighbors and friends who own small cheap cars…. and drive them whenever they can….. so as to save as much as eighty percent on gasoline per mile….. compared to their trucks. These people NEED trucks. They don’t buy them just to fetch the beer, or tow a boat once in a while.

      Parking the truck saves enough money, on fuel and in wear and tear on the truck, that having the small car is a no brainer bargain. ( The cars they buy and drive are old and cheap. Depreciation is not a serious issue in penciling out the score. I used to own a small cheap car myself, for this very reason…… to save on gasoline for the truck, and to save wear and tear on the truck, so that it will last years longer. But I don’t drive enough miles these days to justify the car on a dollars and cents basis. )

      OIL DEPLETES. Hideaway and his friends do everything they can to avoid any serious discussion of depletion.

      Building out wind and solar infrastructure, and electrifying transportation to the extent we can, as soon as we can, means we can probably stretch out our one time gift of nature supply of oil to the point that we’ll have ENOUGH to keep the wheels of essential industries turning for a LOT longer than we would otherwise….

      How much longer? I can’t say, but my own scientific wild ass guess is an extra twenty, thirty, or forty years. That’s long enough to change our ways on the grand scale, so as to get used to living on a lot less energy per capita, and still live reasonably well. That’s long enough for two, three, maybe four or more new technologies to come to technical maturity and scale up.. up on the grand scale. Some existing technologies can and will likely expand by a factor of five or ten. such as insulation for instance….. so that we use twice or three times as much, for a typical construction job, as we used to use, a few decades back, or as much as we use TODAY, as often as not.

      Sure this is going to cost a lot of money……. but three times the money put into insulation, depending on the cost of energy down the road, may be a world class bargain.

      We’re going to be SCALING DOWN…. and scaling down may well turn out to be a super duper deal in a lot of ways.

      As of today, I would so help me Sky Daddy, rather pay a couple of hundred bucks for a refrigerator or washing machine built twenty or thirty or forty years ago, assuming it’s been lightly used, than to pay a couple of thousand bucks or more for a new one. Sure these older ones broke down…. but they WERE repairable…… and the new ones sold today are going to scrapyards at an astounding pace……. because they simply cannot BE effectively repaired. Twice as much energy expense is a no brainer bargain, considering that these older machines can be and are routinely kept in service more or less indefinitely.

      Google it.

      There are countless ways to partially or more or less totally solve the solar power intermittency issue.

      If the application is domestic hot water, the problem can be eighty or ninety percent solved by simply doubling the size of a home hot water heater, plus doubling the amount of insulation. With a smart grid, or a simple timer, such a water heater is likely to run for days and sometimes weeks at a time, using solar and or wind juice rather than gas fired juice…… DEPLETING gas.

      We can go directly to solar hot water, thereby conserving solar electricity for more important uses… such as keeping a refrigerator nice and cold.

      Refrigerators aren’t luxuries. They’re super duper bargains in terms of getting the most value out of our food dollars. Milk keeps a day or so, without refrigeration. With it….. a couple of weeks at least, before it even starts to taste stale.

      Incidentally…… older refrigerators and washing machines worked just fine without any computer chips at all. Sure they took more copper…. but that copper can be reused over and over again.

      I can keep a sixties vintage truck running just fine without any computer chips or any rare earths or any little black boxes, until it’s worn out. Sure it runs dirty, sure it uses more fuel….. but when the issue is having a truck, and using it A LOT LESS, for a lot longer……… or doing without a truck…….. I’ll go with the fifties engineering.

      A fifties truck is more or less infinitely repairable…… in the sense that any particular part, even the engine block or frame, can be replaced, at far lower cost than scrapping it…. especially if the design is standardized, so that repairability is optimized, rather than severely compromised.

      Any older truck mechanic will tell you that he would rather swap out a two ton diesel engine in an old dump truck, in a properly equipped shop, than to swap out the engine in his own late model car.

      If he worked in a shop that stuck mostly to one make of engine, three or four starters and three or four water pumps, kept on hand, meant a starter or water pump job went out the door with zero wait time for parts nearly every time.

      I could keep enough spares on hand to take care of almost one hundred percent of my plumbing related work on the farm… and my farm had a lot of plumbing ….. including a mile of high pressure galvanized pipe installed for the express purpose of applying pesticides using a centrally located pump and a fire hose like arrangement moved from place to place, to a connection point located every three to four hundred feet.

      My grand fathers, when they were young, raised thousands of bushels of apples with no pesticides at all. Good apples, not as pretty, but just as nutritious, and in near comparable quantities per acre as we routinely produce today.

      They grafted their own trees. No nursery needed. We made our own wooden boxes, right on the farm, when I was a kid, using our own trees to mill the lumber. We bought nails but paper bags, plastic bags, and cardboard boxes were novelties rather than purchased inputs.

      We could have, if necessary, produced nearly as many bushels using a couple of horses and a wagon, in terms of the field work…. although there was no way we could have gotten a substantial crop to market without trucks.

      But with a shrinking population, and plenty of people glad for any sort of employment, we COULD in the future produce enough basic foodstuffs and fiber with maybe one person out of ten, rather than one out of a hundred, actually working on a farm.

      Downsizing is at least possible, as the population starts to shrink, and as some high tech industries either fade away or vanish like a bursting bubble. How successful we may be in this endeavor will depend on how fast things go south, and whether we’re lucky enough to have credible leadership.

      We may be looking at a crash and burn scenario….. or we may be looking at a landing whereby quite a few of us walk away…… and as they used to say in the flying biz… any landing you can walk away from is a good one.

      I’m personally sure that it’s going to be one or the other scenario.

      If it’s crash and burn, it will happen pretty fast, and it’s going to be ugly in the extreme. People will die hard within a matter of days or weeks at the most, by the tens of millions, from starvation, thirst, exposure, disease, or violence.

      If it’s a more or less successful controlled contraction, it’s going to be tough as hell, with nearly everything rationed, people told what to do, where to work, what they will be working on, etc. Top down regulations will be enforced at gunpoint, if necessary. Martial law’s the name of the game. Some places, and some people, will likely be sacrificed, in attempting to preserve as much of the whole as possible.

      Things are going to be tough as hell, no matter what.

      But the odds are imo at least fair to good that some of us can pull through while preserving something of today’s industrial based civilization.

      Even if we are forced by to a preindustrial revolution economic model, we’ll still have the benefit of a ton of modern day knowledge…. such as for instance how to control a contagious disease by way of quarantine, and quite a bit of heavy infrastructure will still be in good enough condition to be useful indefinitely……. for instance a highway passing thru mountains. The pavement may cease to exist…. but the road itself will still be there, easily maintained in good enough condition for use with horses and mules.

      I don’t see any reason why most commercial and or industrial buildings won’t be serviceable for a very long time.. assuming of course that they’re well cared for. Farmland that’s been cleared and used for crops or pasture can be kept clear, at substantial expense in labor of course, with nothing more than basic hand tools…… and there’ll be plenty of people to provide the necessary labor.

      It may be, assuming the climate doesn’t go totally nuts, that bison will roam the open plains again, since we won’t be needing tens of millions of acres worth of wheat and corn. Maybe we’ll have salted down bison and bison fur coats and bison leather shoes. Point being, there might be some bright spots.

      Hell, a few people may be living in masonry houses along rivers that have migratory fish sufficient for them to live more or less like hunter gatherers but with nice stainless steel knives and cooking pots rather than stone tools.

      Let your imagination run wild once in a while.

      There’s one thing to be said for the future. It won’t be boring.

      1. OFM
        A fifties truck is more or less infinitely repairable
        This is mostly an illusion. As many failed development aid projects have discovered, even simple repairs require a supply chain of spare parts, not to mention fuel, oil and other fluids cars use. Plonking a machine, even a simple water pump, out in the middle of nowhere doesn’t work for more than a couple of years.

        Americans suffer from a suburban derangement syndrome that makes it impossible to imagine a world where things you need are actually in short supply. They have a post-apocalypse dreams of living on a mountain in Idaho and getting around in their 4 wheel drive vehicle, forgetting that they need gas for that. If you don’t live in town where you can walk to the farmers market, you’re gonna starve.

        If the supply chains break down you won’t even get fuel, let alone spare parts. There won’t be any of this Madmaxing around, because fuel tanks will all be empty. The millions of vehicles on the road will be junk.

        1. I blame The Walking Dead more, since even years after the zombie apocalypse, they still had cars being found totally drivable with no indication of the battery dying or the fuel going off or tyres perishing.

          At least in Mad Max, they have oil wells and refineries that refine as they need it, so you don’t have the petrol go off after a few months. Unsure about the rest of the parts, cool as it would be to have a V8 Interceptor, I imagine horses and bikes are more likely.

          This is probably similar to the normalisation bias that occurs to most Westerners. See that US airliner evacuation video from the other week where no one seems fazed by the fire onboard and are all just doing their own thing, because nothing bad would dare happen to such mollycoddled people. Reality begs to differ, though.

        2. IF there’s a controlled downsizing of the economy, there will be spare parts for things that are ESSENTIAL.
          Have you ever PERSONALLY read history involving top down control of the economy during wartime?

          Trucks got built…. but only in a VERY few models. Parts were interchangeable to an extreme degree.

          The same engine could be and WAS used in standardized trucks built by different manufacturers, ditto nearly all the other critical parts. Nowadays we have standardized batteries, tires, lights, etc…… but dozens of sizes of each. In wartime, once on a wartime footing, with civilian sales limited to near zero…. maybe a dozen tire sizes will be enough.. plus some others for EXISTING trucks of course.

          When the choice is a truck that is CRITICALLY needed, and a golf cart that is not…. the materials going into golf carts will be going into that truck.

          Now OF COURSE things may well get to the point that no new trucks can be built at all…… and to the point that even if you have a good truck, you won’t be able to get any fuel for it.

          Well, if it gets that bad, it gets that bad. You will still have had some time, maybe as long as a decade or two to adapt, if you can, to getting by, maybe first without air travel, maybe next without golf carts, maybe after that without new tv sets and home computers, in no particular order, except for ONE THING… the people running the show will make the right decisions about what IS and is NOT produced, so long as they get it right.

          And once they get it WRONG……. well, I guess we’ll be back to just fucking giving up and dying FAST, quite possibly within a few hours, almost for sure within a few weeks, if the industrial economy seizes up, like an overheated old truck engine that will never ever run again.

          I can get by, myself, without toilet paper, or paper towels, or shampoo. I could, if I have no choice in the matter, get by without more than a single bar of soap for a very long time… probably for a decade… because I can wash with a rag and warm water, or even cold water.

          WILL we have a more or less controlled descent?

          It’s my personal belief that we will, if we’re lucky enough that things start going bad fast enough that we wake up and get our act together BEFORE it’s too late…….. and we’re lucky enough that the people running the show are competent. They may be the worst sort of rogues….

          But if they know what to do, they THEMSELVES will survive, as the leaders of whatever people and whatever parts of the economy continue to function.

          People like Stalin for instance could have fled their home country, and lived like royalty in some other country…. but they didn’t. As BAD as they were, they kept the wheels on, kept the absolutely essential industries up and running….. and their country, and their people mostly survived. A lot of them died in concentration camps, or from a bullet in the back of the head, or from over work, or disease, or malnutrition.. but the top down management model worked to the point that they HAD trucks, and fuel for them, and parts for them……. and even A car for individuals high enough up in the management hierarchy.

          Televisions…. hardly any, washing machines……. probably, if you were on a waiting list long enough. Steak or sea food…. well, some salted fish, as likely as not.

          Cabbage and potatoes……. enough to live, most of them, most of the time.

          Now how long it might be possible to keep trucks on the road, and diesel fuel available for them….. that’s an open question.

          IF things go to hell in a hand basket, you might be buying your last tank full of fuel the same day WWIII gets started.. if you buy it an hour before the first ICBM arrives.

          Or if you’re a farmer like me, and you need a few hundred gallons to raise some beans and corn.. there’s SOME hope that you’ll get it….. depending on how long it takes for the people,and the leadership to realize the score….. even if it arrives in an olive drab tanker with a couple of guys loaded for bear riding shotgun with every intention of shooting first and asking questions later, if anybody feels like trying them on for size.

          Maybe, if I’m still around, I would be able to get that diesel fuel for a couple of years….. or ten years.

          If I get it for ten years, then there will be SOME BEANS and SOME CORN available for any body still around… assuming they’re in good standing on the welfare rolls. It won’t matter a whole lot if the people running the government, such as it may be humane or brutal, decide any particular person or group or community isn’t going to be pulling it’s own weight going forward. If you and your community are judged to be a probable net plus…. you get some beans and corn. Otherwise…… you either hustle up some food on your own, or you starve.

          Or worse.

          Forcible downsizing isn’t going to be any fun….. except for some psychopaths who will wind up in positions enabling them to pursue their own personal agenda. In that case, if you have a beautiful young daughter, you’ll have to hide her, or see her kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery.

          In case anybody who thinks I have MY head up MY ass, I’m trying to make it clear that I’ve put thousands and thousands of hours into reading history, and the study of war, and the study of human nature. I’ve thought these things through…… many times over.

          When I’ve painted pictures that would make some people pee in their pants, I’ve painted it as a BEST CASE or near best case scenario.

          The people who don’t believe in going renewable, and who apparently don’t REALLY believe we’ll ever run out of oil and gas, etc, don’t seem to have given this matter any serious thought at all.

          The sort of downsizing they seem to be talking about will ever only happen at gun point….. if it so happens that our government falls into the hands of people along the lines of Pol Pot, or Chairman Mao, or Stalin, or Hitler…… or trump.

          There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of people in general supporting forced downsizing of families or voluntary austerity…… UNLESS they come to realize before it’s too late that they have no choice but go the mandatory forced downsizing route, or perish.

          And of course it goes without saying that a hell of a lot of people won’t go along, because they don’t understand what’s happening, or because they believe that any proposed solutions are scams.

          But it’s safe to say that the government of a country such as the USA will do at least SOME things to help ensure the survival of the country, and the people.

          Any such actions may prove to be too little too late. No guarantees.

          1. OFM …. “It’s my personal belief that we will, if we’re lucky enough that things start going bad fast enough that we wake up and get our act together BEFORE it’s too late…….. and we’re lucky enough that the people running the show are competent. They may be the worst sort of rogues….”

            If the ‘people in charge’ were going to get their act together it should have been 40-50 years ago, when Limits to growth spelled out the real trouble. Instead they went with the belief that technology would save us and have allowed the world population to more than double…

            Up until today you had an 81 year old dementia patient running again for president against a liar, felon and crook, with these 2 being recognised by their parties as the BEST possible candidates, yet you want to assume the people running the show are competent???

            The curtain does not match the carpets…..

            In all those history books, and reading you did, how often was the energy available to do anything declining rapidly?? That’s the real problem, it will be vastly different to anything experienced in the last couple of centuries where we have had energy growth!! You keep overlooking this point, yet it’s easily the most important one!!

            OFM “There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of people in general supporting forced downsizing of families or voluntary austerity.”

            I know, I agree, which is why we are headed over a cliff into a fast collapse, as no-one will do what’s necessary!! I keep saying it but you keep missing it…

            OFM “The people who don’t believe in going renewable, and who apparently don’t REALLY believe we’ll ever run out of oil and gas, etc, don’t seem to have given this matter any serious thought at all.”

            Who are these people?? Most of us who don’t think renewables are close to an answer, also know that fossil fuels are leaving us… It’s NOT a one or the other, it’s both don’t work once we get into serious oil decline!!

          2. As I was driving into town the other day, I noticed how thick the smoke was, obscuring the mountains. My eyes smarted. Alongside the highway, the BN (Berkshire Hathaway – Warren Buffet) coal train, two miles long, headed West.

  6. Living under the radar-
    is what most people desperately try to do in authoritarian states, and in regions ruled by warlords and gangs.
    Authoritarianism is becoming weaponized through technology with Ubiquitous Technical Surveillance becoming closer to reality each day. AI will amplify the capability a billion fold.
    This will become a top priority use of energy, controlled by the authoritarian state that derives the benefit of universal control of all those within their corral.
    The race/fight behind the scenes for control over this capability is a quiet but massive battle.
    Will those who gain control have in mind the common good, or simply their personal and small tribal benefit?
    I think you know the answer.
    Don’t delude yourself into thinking that you can be immune or migrate away from it all.

    1. I’m going to migrate to somewhere where the environment and humanity aren’t.

      1. Northern Sweden would have been a good choice but since the Stockholmers got their way, now we are also fxxxed… On the “plus” side, I`m in between two primary targets now, so hopefully it won´t hurt that much or long…

  7. https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=251718

    For those interested in more info on the Crowd Strike debacle.

    KD built one of the first internet companies, his opinions on IT are always worth a read.

    He blames D.E.I (he calls it D.I.E ) not hiring people based on their merit but rather their diversity.

    and

    Pooled risk – outsourcing IT and using cloud means that only 1 company has to f-up to bring down many. An you can’t VET or IDENTIFY who their employees are.

    This is a problem everywhere including Energy infrastructure.

    1. Ridiculous. It was a software screwup. Blaming minorities for everything that goes wrong is an age-old trick that says more about the accuser than the problem.

      1. Indeed. The funny thing I found out, the CTO for McAfee that caused an Internet outage on XP machines in 2010 now works as a C-suite guy in CrowdStrike. It’s like they fail up and also actively hire everyone else’s fuck ups.

        1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McAfee

          ” two-time presidential candidate who unsuccessfully sought the Libertarian Party nomination for president of the United States in 2016 and in 2020″

          The Original founder of McAfee…John Mcafee was a strange guy and VERY interesting story.

          He wrote the Anti-Virus software.

          But he was also writing the VIRUS’s that his software was preventing.

          A sinister but BRILLIANT plan.

          He disappeared from the face of the Earth at one point ….. and was found in a Spanish prison.

          Need to make a NETFLIX about this.

      2. “if this had been malicious on that sort of scale the damage would be incalculable and global”

        I completely agree with his Pooled Risk assessment and

        the psuedocode he provided which can completely scramble your data.

        One company hosting many companies is a recipe for disaster for critical infrastructure.

        You got no idea where your data is, no idea who is looking at it, no idea where the backups are, etc. etc

      3. I don’t agree with KD’s politics, I do agree with his tech skills.

        It’s not blaming minorities. I certainly don’t. Some of the smartest people I have worked with were minorities.

        Its blaming hiring people who don’t have the skills and letting them manage the critical infrastructure of MANY COMPANIES.

      4. Crowdstrike runs in kernel mode, unlike almost all Windows applications, which run in user mode. Usually only things internal to the operating system like device drivers run in this highly privileged mode, with direct access to hardware including memory.

        All multi-user systems have something like the kernel mode. It makes it possible to manage resources between multiple programs running at the same time. An error in a kernel mode application causes a blue screen. A user mode error just crashes the program.

        Most software that runs in kernel mode has to go through a lengthy certification at Microsoft, for obvious reasons. But because new security threats need to be dealt with fast, Crowdstrike runs scripts which are tested much less rigorously, and get certified much faster. These scripts also run in kernel mode.

        The bug has already been found. It was in one of these scripts. The underlying design flaw is that these scripts don’t have enough built-in protection against crashes.

        Usually when the system doesn’t boot because one driver doesn’t start there is a workaround. This is built in to Windows. But Crowdstrike shuts this down for security reasons. The idea (I presume) is the you don’t want malicious software to boot the system without booting the software designed to protect the system against malicious software.

        The solution to the current problem is to go to each machine, boot in “safe mode”, delete a certain file by hand. Then the system will boot without the latest Crowdstrike update and run as usual. Safe mode boots a very limited version of the operating system and requires physical intervention. That’s a large scale intervention considering how many systems were affected.

    2. Andre,

      I too use the term DIE. I have seen the damage it has down to my industry. Recruitment is now nothing more than box ticking to obtain the perfect balance on DIE criteria. Skills are not important any longer.

      The result is paralysis by analysis. No-one wants to make a decision any longer and points are argued over for ever. Consultants are employed to advise, usually wrongly , because they deploy all the business schools “tools”. When it goes “tits-up” the consultants can be blamed.

  8. The Democrat party is dead. They have betrayed their own president to the point that he capitulates.

    The other party rallies around a racist, an adjudicated rapist, a fraud, a tax cheat.

    The Democrats betray a man who is basically decent but old, that is, older by a whole FOUR YEAR than the aforementioned rapist/fraud.

    We’re fucked.

    1. I disagree Mike.
      Just helping President Biden to see the clear writing on the wall. I expected just one term for him.
      Thank goodness he was able to step up to the plate 4 years ago and save the country from trump in 2020, winning by over 7 million votes. History will be forever grateful for his starring role in that.
      What an outstanding 50 year career of service.
      I sure hope he has a good time once his term is finished.

      Now for the next task at hand…keeping the felon carnival barker court eligible for the nasty deeds he has done.
      And keeping the US AI development from failing solely into the hands of the Fox/Fundamentalist/Q-Maga trinity.
      And keeping Democracy in this country from being whittled down yet further still.

    2. The name is the Democratic Party. Calling it the Democrat Party is just Republican propaganda, like the rest of your comment.

    3. “The Nazi regime considered the elimination of all manifestations of homosexuality in Germany one of its goals. Men were often arrested after denunciation, police raids, and through information uncovered during interrogations of other homosexuals. Those arrested were presumed guilty, and subjected to harsh interrogation and torture to elicit a confession. Between 1933 and 1945, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested as homosexuals; around 50,000 of these were sentenced by civilian courts, 6,400 to 7,000 by military courts [de], and an unknown number by special courts. Most of these men served time in regular prisons, and between 5,000 and 6,000 were imprisoned in concentration camps. The death rate of these prisoners has been estimated at 60 percent, a higher rate than those of other prisoner groups.”

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_homosexuals_in_Nazi_Germany

      No Mike, you and your partner will be fucked. Not me, I’m an old heterosexual white male who can enjoy tax cuts. I’ll even wear that ugly camouflage and pussy hair around my mouth if I have too. I don’t write stupid stuff like “The Democrat party is dead” three months before such an important election. I always vote Democratic party because it’s always about policy and not the person for me. I think you should be able to love who you wish, to control what goes on in your own body, to believe or not to believe in the god of your choice, health care and a quality education for all as a human right, try to protect the planet for the future, unions to represent workers against exploitation and not to be judged by the color of your skin. None of this is possible without democracy.

      Biden and his handlers screwed themselves the night of the debate. They failed at the most important thing they had to do that night. Which was to show he was up for the job and not let his age show otherwise. He can still handle the job today, but he didn’t convince his voters and most of the Dem’s are scared to death of losing.

      So put on your happy face for now and stop bad mouthing the party until we bring home the win. Whomever it is. Because human nature hasn’t changed in the last 100 years and the alternative will be something you can’t even imagine.

      1. I stand corrected on Harris supplanting Biden as candidate. But I still LOATHE the way Democrats treated Biden. It was despicable. Harris is a delight. The atmosphere is distinctly different now.

        However, my old mom–86 years–could be right. She’s a blue-blooded, liberal, Midwestern, Roman Catholic who adores Hilary Clinton.

        “You saw what they did to Hilary because she is a woman!” she warns. “This country will never vote in a woman of color!”

        1. Mike…it was the vast majority of democratic voters who wanted Joe Biden to serve only one term, since 4 more years is an awful lot for someone his age to handle. Its a very demanding job.
          The outpouring of enthusiasm for Harris shows just how ready everyone was for Biden to end his re-election bid. I’m glad he can exit in January with an incredible career of accomplishment.

          If Harris can step up to the plate and play a solid game, I think she will win. I think she is ready to shoulder the load.

          I was at her opening rally for presidential run in 2019 in Oakland,CA. There was great enthusiasm on the streets (far too many people to just say ‘street’). She has grown by magnitudes in the past 4 years by being in the best presidential training course available in the world. Thank you Joe.

            1. Thanks Mike. I bet we see a great tribute at the convention as well.

    1. A dark skinned female cop against the white male criminal.

      It will be a new voting record by more than 10 million votes come November. Lock him up. LOL

    2. He is going to be desperate since the personal legal ramifications of the outcome are huge.
      Watch out.
      A cornered carnival barker can be more dangerous than most realize.

  10. China is cutting interest rates again because you know the last interest rate cuts fixed everything. It’s laughable as a response. Yet at the same time them having cutting rates equals nothing good for global economy.

    WTI opened this week under $80. BTW
    Currently sitting at $79.06

    The real reason Japan’s currency is falling like a rock is because Japanese banks are highly exposed to the mess that China has become.

    1. I remember when Evergrande was the end of China.

      I remember how Russia, with the GDP of maybe Italy, was also going to collapse and implode once sanctions hit.

      1. Evergrande was really just the tip of the iceberg. China is a slow motion train wreck. It’s not realistic to think China will collapse in a straight line.

        China’s banks or the entire banking sector are highly leveraged. Everyone always points to the US debt.

        Well here in the US the debt pretty much equals the GDP. Over in China the debt is over 3 times the GDP. So US is 1 to 1 while China is about 3.5 to 1

        Chinese economy is 3 times as levered as the US is.
        The Chinese are doing everything the can to get their money out of China before the currency collapse.

        1. Before anyone tries to tell me that the Chinese currency isn’t going to collapse. Hear me out first.

          They are in a deflationary debt spiral. They have two choices. Either they have a depression or they devalue their currency.

          Ok let’s just forget about the above. Pretend everything is fine in China.

          Russia’s income from oil sales is currently in the Chinese currency. Russia is currently taking out loans denominated in Chinese yuan. So their income and debt match.

          As the Chinese yuan is used more and more for settlement the value of the yuan goes down not up. Chinese banks would have to issue shitloads of new debt if everybody on that side of the planet started trading in the Chinese currency.

          1. So that means that Russia’s debt is being devalued as the yuan devalues, reducing their exposure?

          2. Why does this matter, though? China has productive output. It is making and building things, and that paid off quite well when Evergrande simply had the gov’t take all the properties that idiot Western investors thought were going to get bailed out despite the CPC saying they were not gonna.

            That debt figure seems off though. Can I ask where you got it from? The most leverage nation is Japan, and they cannot interfere with their currency market because America will not be best pleased.

            If you’re the workshop of the world, I don’t think you have anything to worry about. Devalue the currency if you can, but if a load of nations are buying things in it, pretty sure that means it won’t collapse.

            Again, there are no nations remotely like China. They ain’t going anywhere, and if they did, it’s because the countries buying their productive output collapsed. The Chinese at least have modern infrastructure and services to show. The West just has useless trinkets for the most part.

            Recall how unfazed Russia was to lose the IP of big brands. Everyone expected them to either flail and unravel, or fuck up making good on alternatives. Neither happened. They’re fine, and they don’t need brands from the West when they can just make their equivalent or better products for consumers and be less reliant on neoliberal vampires.

            1. Let me explain a little bit better. I was referring to China’s entire banking sector. All the loans on their balance sheets. Or M2 money supply.

              Their banks have loaned out over 3 times their GDP. Or the size of their banking sector is over 3 times their GDP.

              It’s not a mystery why they are stuck in a deflationary trap. The only way out is a major devaluation of the currency. And when they get around to doing it you’ll see a deflationary tsunami wash up on everyone else’s shores.

              Cheap Chinese made goods become twice as cheap when they devalue. Chinese banking and real estate issues are everybody’s problem.

              Can you imagine the tariffs the EU and USA would have to slap on Chinese made goods if the yuan were to devalue by a significant percentage?

              China has no easy way out here. Not to mention China losing purchasing power on all the stuff they import by devaluing.

              In the meantime while they aren’t actually devaluing their currency. Less and less foreign capital is entering China. Which is why their currency is grinding lower currently.

              Right now everyone wants to get their money out of China.

              All the talk of a BRIC’s currency. All I see is a move to make the Yuan more widely used. Russian companies are now borrowing in yuan from Chinese banks. Instead of borrowing in Rubles.

              From a Russian point of view. It would make sense for everybody else to also pay for oil in Chinese yuan since the majority of Russian oil and gas sales are in Chinese yuan.

              The more the Chinese yuan is adopted as the currency to be traded in, borrowed in, the less value the currency will retain.

              While the value of the dollar goes through the roof because of the contraction in the Eurodollar market. Which is also going to be devastating to the global economy.

              The people that tell you that the dollar is at death’s doorstep don’t really understand the dollar. They view the US being the center of the dollar universe. Which isn’t correct. The center of the dollar universe is the offshore Eurodollar market.

              What happens outside the US matters way more. Counterparty risk in the Eurodollar market is what matters. As the risk goes up banks make less loans. Yet the $100 trillion in Eurodollar denominated debt that resides outside the US remains.

              Nobody wants to admit it. Especially the FED with its $7 trillion in bank reserves that there is in fact a dollar shortage going on particularly in an Asia.

              $7 trillion in bank reserves that never leave the FED’s balance sheet don’t make the $100 trillion on global Eurodollar banks balance sheets payable.

  11. I believe HB has pretty well nailed it down, nice and tight.

    Biden for all intents and purposes lost the election when debating trump because he came across just as trump and his cronies have been describing him for the last few years.

    Hopefully Harris will prove to be a good enough campaigner to win.

    She has a fair to good shot at it, imo.

  12. Hideaway/ JT

    Thank you for your comment on the last week. Keep up the good work. Too many on this blog cannot understand simple thermodynamics and even fewer EROEI. The hand wavers, often backed by some invisible higher being, believe that there is a way to maintain BAU by electrifying everything. Some talk of a manged collapse in population decline and the recycling of raw materials on an infinite basis. The I believe camp.
    As the population declines so will the skill sets (though this is already occuring in some fields) and our collective knowledge base. Everyday items we take for granted, such as a toothbrush, spectacles, a razor, a pair of shoes, a pen will all become much more expensive, if they are available.
    A for fixing cars just where will the lubricating oil come from? What about a cylinder head gasket set, a water pump, a tyre, an ignition coil, a set of points. Within a very short time all the spare parts and consumer goods we rely on will disappear.

    1. The aspect about old machinery that most don’t seem to understand, is that it’s usually one part that fails first in just about every iteration of that machine. For example certain cars were always famous for the coil disintegrating, or the gearbox ‘going’, so most old machinery becomes mostly useless fairly quickly with lots of the ‘good bits’ still working.

      Going back a few years a friend of mine bought up a certain model of an old car with the intention of buying lots of old ones and keeping a couple going for his family. he bought about a dozen cheaply over the years and had a shed full of spar parts, but still had to buy certain NEW parts because they tended to fail all the time in all the vehicles…

      Another question for OFM… how many of those 50’s trucks do you see WORKING on roads these days? How will you get enough food to cities with these few remaining old trucks? Plus of course, where will you get fuel and lubricating oil, replacement filters, new injectors etc, for them from after collapse…

      1. I’m sorry to have to point out that you actually know next to nothing about this particular topic, in terms of what’s possible and entirely practical, versus what’s typically done as a matter of “business as usual”.

        If I need a part for a typical ( any make ) Chevrolet truck built within the last twenty years, let’s say a starter motor, there are probably at least fifty, and maybe a hundred various stock numbers for this part.

        In the early fifties, there were maybe three variations, based on a common design but using bigger stronger parts for bigger engines. If you worked on pickups and cars, as opposed to commercial vehicles, you could keep just two starters for Chevy’s. Most of the parts between these two were interchangeable.

        Now it’s quite true that a hundred or so parts of one of these old Chevy trucks very commonly failed… and that once enough of them were either bad or likely to go bad before too much longer, it was time to get a new or newer truck.

        BUT this was not BECAUSE these failing parts couldn’t be made to last two, three, four or five or even ten times longer. It’s because it was more PROFITABLE for the manufacturer, and more economical for the truck owner, to trade up to a new or newer truck.

        Now here’s where your first grade lesson starts. You can buy a new Mack dump truck….. which has just about all the same basic parts as a pickup truck…….. NOT INTERCHANGEABLE, but there for the same purpose. Frame, springs, axles, bearings, brakes, lights, doors, transmission, engine, differential, floor matts, driver’s seat, on and on.

        Virtually every part of that Mack is built to last three, four or five times as long as the corresponding part of a pickup truck. The Mack is designed and manufactured to make it quick and easy to repair as necessary. The various parts of the pickup are not likely to be interchangeable for more than four or five model years at best. The Mack parts are likely interchangeable up to twenty or more years.

        So…… old pickup trucks typically go to the scrap yard at less than three hundred thousand miles, and often no more than half that. An old Mack dump truck is not likely to have less than five or six hundred thousand miles on it when it’s scrapped.

        Now…… let’s just SUPPOSE we’re downsizing, because we have NO CHOICE, it’s HAPPENING no matter what.

        BUT we DO have a choice as to whether we just let it happen, or do what we can to save as much as we can, of all the goods and services that are ESSENTIAL to our continued existence as an industrial society.

        ONE color of paint is ENOUGH. The same exact fenders and doors good enough ten or twenty years ago are still good enough. The same brakes, suspension, transmission, windshield, engine, etc, are good enough.

        I can only guess as to how many trucks are ESSENTIAL on a per capita basis in the USA, under extreme wartime austerity conditions……. but I’m guessing that we can get by under such circumstances with one third as many, maybe even fewer. Potatoes, rather than potato chips, if you get my meaning.

        Now it’s trivially easy to make a given part last three or four times as long in more cases than not. You just build in a little extra quality while manufacturing it. It’s trivially easy to just DO WITHOUT hundreds of parts….. for instance all the parts of an air conditioning system.

        Now you’re down to one third the tooling and factory space and employees needed to manufacture one third as many new trucks. They can be made to last way past any layman’s guess as to how long.

        A new mechanic can learn the brakes within a few days or weeks…… because once you know the brakes on a given truck, you pretty much know the brakes on all of them, if you’re a soldier. Ditto suspensions, transmissions, engines, etc, in general terms.

        Now as to WHERE you get fuel, lubricants, and parts…… you need only maybe three or four different oil filters…… not a couple of hundred. You get the fuel and lubricants by diverting whatever is available FROM non essential uses to rationed access to people doing ESSENTIAL work.

        You do what HAS to be done to maintain production of these ESSENTIAL parts and lubricants.

        If you think diesel fuel is expensive at say ten bucks a gallon, let me hit you upside the head with a broken brick, speaking from my own actual family experience. When my paternal grandfather was a boy, he left before daylight to take a load of produce to town, and load up a few things for the return trip. He got back after dark. TWO HORSEPOWER, literally speaking, got a ton or so of corn, beans, tomatoes, etc, to town.

        The last time I hauled a truck load on my own F700 I took about six tons or so, and was on the road only a little over thirty minutes each way…. and used only about five gallons or so of gasoline round trip, about twenty five to thirty miles, depending on my customer’s address.

        Gasoline used for this ESSENTIAL job would still be a bargain at twenty or thirty or even forty bucks a gallon, compared to using horses.

        Ethanol is WAY cheaper than hay, if you burn it in a truck delivering a truck load of grain to market.

        Military people know all about this sort of thing. We’re flying some planes that are twice as old, at least, as the air crews… because they’re so insanely expensive to build in the first place….. but designed to be maintained and upgraded for a very long time, fifty or even seventy five years, maybe even longer.

        I don’t know just where the limits are, what’s actually possible, what will prove to be impossible, some years down the road.

        But I do know that if we get our collective asses in gear, some of us can walk away from the coming crash, and hopefully keep the lights on for quite some time….. long enough to adapt to living with whatever we can salvage.

        As the old pilots say, any landing you can walk away from is a good one.

    2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEXJ_YyRH6A

      EDIT: although the above cringe is funny, I actually think Trump picking Vance is funnier right now as the guy is an imbecile and maybe Harris has narrowed the gap. We shall see.

      Not seeing any tsunami or even a clear winner. Too early to tell, but with how this came out, I’m guessing Biden is not long for this world.

      2. The House race as well as well as the presidency will be a blue tsunami. The Senate will be a nail biter. Anyway, that’s my prediction. You can remind me of it after the election in November.

          1. Wild horses could not keep me from the polls in November. Only death. And I do hope to live long enough to see the defeat of that stupid sonofabitch Donald Trump.

            2. Thanks for the link HB, I just watched it. It really makes your blood boil while scaring the hell out of you. Click on the blue link below to get the hell scared out of you by the religiously indoctrinated ultra-right called MAGA>

              Bad Faith

            3. No Ron, thank you for starting this site. Your a gentleman and a gift to humanity. Stay strong and positive.

              Agree with your assessment on the documentary. It really explains what’s going on. Everyone should watch it.

        2. I don’t care if the “tsunami” is chartreuse. As long as the red bleeds out . . . .

  14. The childhood home of President elect Harris in Berkeley, California. She lived upstairs with her mother, who was a graduate student and researcher at Univ of Calif, above the Montessori School on the first floor. I used to live about 2 miles from there.

  15. Today is an interesting day in the US as far as electricity is concerned. From Philadelphia to Denver from the Canadian border to Houston with well over 100,000 MWs of installed capacity about 5000 MWs are being generated by wind. In fact in the Southwest Power Pool 98% of their power is being provided by coal and nat gas. What would millions of people do without FF. No work, hospitals limping along on diesel generators, traffic at a standstill etc etc. There is no wind today, it’s happened before and it will happen again. I can’t understand why so many are so hell bent to place at such a risk of catastrophe. Just goes to prove, “Sometimes the wind isn’t blowing somewhere.

    1. Ervin wrote: “I can’t understand why so many are so hell bent to place at such a risk of catastrophe.”

      Exactly how climate scientists feel about fossil fuel combustion Ervin.

  16. JULY 21 HOTTEST DAY EVER RECORDED GLOBALLY: EU CLIMATE MONITOR

    “The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said the global average surface air temperature of 17.09 degrees Celsius (62.7 degrees Fahrenheit) on Sunday was the warmest in their record books, which go back to 1940. It comes as heat waves and wildfires ravage swathes of Europe and the United States.”

    https://phys.org/news/2024-07-july-hottest-day-globally-eu.html

    1. And people will look back in the next decade and reminisce how nice and cool it was in 2024.

  17. We shall see how Harris handles nutandyahoo’s visit.
    Defining

  18. I generally don’t give free advice and insight to opponents, but here you go for those who generally vote republican-
    Going forward try to pick leaders who most of the country can consider to be of good character…
    trustworthy, honest, truthful, good judgement, humble, and dedicated to country over party and self.
    If you can find anything like that in what is left of the party activists, insiders, and candidates.

    The specific policies package is of secondary concern.
    There is one person in the republican camp who I would put in that category of worthy to consider-
    Liz Cheney. She would garner wide respect, beyond just the WWWrestling and Q-Maga crowd that dominates the republican tribe now. You’d have to kick out all of the crazy extremists who dominate the scene now.

    Its a shame for the country, which needs at least two adults at the table of discussions.
    Try to find non-partisan news outlets…Fox and Tucker Carlson/Rush Limbaugh types have destroyed you

  19. “Monday, 22 July 2024 was the hottest day ever recorded…

    …beating Sunday’s record.”

    Probably out of date

  20. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13672003/Archaeologists-altar-Jesus-Jerusalem.html

    Archaeologists discover an altar where Jesus was said to have been resurrected.

    Again, I am a non believer and if you are interested in whether an influential human named Jesus existed

    Bart Ehrman (UNC Chapel Hill professor of New Testament)

    Wrote book arguing that he did but he was just a human (based on evidence)
    https://www.amazon.com/Did-Jesus-Exist-Bart-D-Ehrman-audiobook/dp/B008J9FFQ8

    The “Misquoting Jesus” podcast is great too
    https://www.bartehrman.com/podcast/

    1. “The Jesus you discover here may not be the Jesus you had hoped to meet – but he did exist, whether we like it or not.”

        1. The new testament is not all fiction. The super natural stuff is IMO.

          It also contains actual history, human psychology, literary talent, etc.

          Noah’s Ark (Old Testament) probably was a severe flood, it just got exaggerated over time to a global castatrophe
          by people who only knew there local area.

          I agree not to teach kids myths and legends as facts.

          Let them grow up and figure it out for themselves.

          While also not showing them the potentially traumatising aspects of reality until they are older.

          I think it is in our tribal DNA that kids are highly susceptible to what their parents / peer groups teach them at a young age..

          Then it literally gets embedded in the brain during brain development.

          This would have been good for group cohesion in the African Savannah.

          Not so much with nuclear bombs and peak oil.

          1. Noah’s Ark (Old Testament) probably was a severe flood
            According to a friend of mine who is a professor for ancient Semitic languages, the story comes from a Aramaic primer.

            When the Assyrians conquered the Mideast in the 8th century BCE or so, they decided to get everyone in the empire speaking the same language, and to break up local language groups. The story of Baylonian captivity and the Hebrew fetish was a (much later) reaction to this. That is also where the shibboleth story comes from.

            Part of the process was distributing cuneiform clay tablets all across the region with basic Aramaic texts to teach locals the new imperial language. One of the stories they chose was the story of Gilgamesh and the flood. Lots of these tablets are still around. You find them scattered all over the region.

            Centuries later, after the Persian had taken over from the Assyrians, there was a move to undo the Assyrian ethnic cleansing. The Persians had a much more hands-off approach to imperialism. The Shah asked for some documentation of the existence of Israel, so the Old Testament was compiled and written down in Aramaic capital letters, which the Persians used to carve Aramaic in stone.

            That is what the original Hebrew alphabet is — the script used to impress the Persian Shah. Vowel markings were added in the Middle Ages as a reading aid, because Aramaic script lacked vowels. The Middle Ages is also the time when the story about spelling “god” “g-d” was invented, and other games like spelling Yahu Jehova by swapping out the vowels.

            Ironically, one of the stories instrumental in the ethnic cleansing was adopted as an authentic native story.

  21. LA County is larger than 40 different states.

    But CA still has only 2 Senators.
    At least we can vote for them now.

    1. They are probably about 2 dozen fixes to US democracy that would make it stronger and more effective.
      Don’t hold your breathe.

      1. Nerfing the Senate would be a good start. Those idiots have proven to the world time and again that they have no understanding of basic parliamentary procedure.

        But the most urgent problem is the de facto legalization of money laundering (dark money) and bribery (lobbying).

  22. Believe him! Trump, in this one minute video tells Christians that if you vote for him you will never have to vote anymore. He will have it fixed so you will never have to vote anymore. This will be the last election ever if he is elected. What he is saying is that he, or a dictator just like him, will rule America forever. No more elections.

    Click on the link below. It will blow your mind. He actually said it out loud.

    You will never have to vote again!

    1. So ironic to hear of him speaking to Christians as if he is some authority figure.
      We have never had a US candidate who is less religious, less spiritual, less hindered by the constraints
      of morality, of ethics, or of law in the history of this nation.

      His guiding principle is none of those things, rather it is rank materialism.
      His only goal in life is the for gathering wealth and power unto himself, no matter the cost to anyone else
      or to the country, to the democracy, or to the civility of the culture. Period.
      Full Stop.

    2. “No, I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.”
      ― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

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