It’s long been a source of wry amusement to me that some of my critics like to insist that I never admit it when I’m wrong. What makes that amusing to me is partly that it’s not true—I’ve discussed my mistakes tolerably often in these online essays—and partly that it’s very clear that what actually gets the goat of the critics in question is that I’m right quite a bit more often than they are. Yet it’s true enough, of course, that not all the predictions I’ve made over the twenty years of my blogging career have panned out.
In the early days of The Archdruid Report, in particular, my understanding of the political, economic, and cultural forces that are shaping the long twilight of the industrial age was much less complete than I realized at the time. While the basic shape of the future I sketched out in those first posts still stands—and in fact we’ve already slid past some of the more obvious milestones on the way to that future—my sense of the timeline involved, and the terrain to be covered on the way to that destination, was seriously flawed. It was clear to me already that we were facing a long descent. What I hadn’t yet grasped back then was just how long, uneven, and muddled the descent would be.
With that in mind, as we proceed with the reexamination of peak oil I announced two weeks ago, I want to begin with the earliest and least accurate of my attempts to summarize the whole shape of the future ahead of us. The post was titled “Briefing for the Descent,” and it appeared on The Archdruid Report on September 6, 2006; you can read the whole thing here. The most relevant paragraphs for our present purpose are these.
“Though the future we face is not an apocalypse, four horsemen still define the most likely scenario. First out of the starting gate is declining energy availability. Sometime between now and 2010, world petroleum production peaks, falters, and begins an uneven but irreversible descent. North American natural gas supplies start their terminal decline around the same time. Some of the slack can be taken up by coal, wind and other renewables, nuclear power, and conservation, but not all. As oil depletion accelerates, and other resources such as fissionable uranium and Eurasian natural gas hit their own production peaks, the shortfall widens, and many lifestyles and business models that depend on cheap energy become nonviable.
“The second horseman, hard on the hooves of the first, is economic contraction. As petroleum production begins to decline, energy prices skyrocket as nations, regions and individuals engage in bidding wars driven to extremes by rampant speculation. The global economy, which made economic sense only in the context of the artificially low oil prices of the 1990s, comes apart at the seams, driving many import- and export-based industries onto the ropes, setting off a wave of bankruptcies and business failures, and causing shortages of many consumer products, all the way down to such essentials as food and clothing. Soaring energy prices have the same effect more directly in many areas of the domestic economy. Unemployment climbs to Great Depression levels and poverty becomes widespread.
“The third horseman, following the second by a length or two, is collapsing public health. As poverty rates spiral upwards, shortages and energy costs impact the food supply chain, energy intensive health care becomes unaffordable for all but the obscenely rich, and global warming and ecosystem disruption drive the spread of tropical and emerging diseases, malnutrition and disease become major burdens. People begin to die of what were once minor, treatable conditions, and chronic illnesses such as diabetes become death sentences as medicines price themselves out of reach. Death rates soar as rates of live birth slump, launching the first wave of population contraction.
“The fourth horseman, galloping along in the wake of the first three, is political turmoil. What political scientists call ‘liberal democracy’ is a system in which competing elite groups buy the loyalty of sectors of the electorate by handing out economic largesse. That system depends on abundant fossil fuels and the industrial economy they make possible. Many of today’s political institutions will not survive the end of cheap energy, and the changeover to new political arrangements will likely involve violence. International affairs face similar realignments as nations whose power and influence depend on access to abundant, cheap energy fall from their present positions of strength, while ‘backward’ nations find their less energy-dependent economies becoming a source of strength rather than weakness in world affairs. If history is any guide, these power shifts will work themselves out on the battlefield.
“The most important thing to remember about all four of these factors is that they’re self-limiting in the middle term. As energy prices soar, economies contract, and the demand for energy decreases, bringing prices back down. As the global economy comes apart, human needs remain, and local economies take up the slack as best they can with the resources on hand, producing new opportunities and breathing new life into moribund sectors of the economy. As public health fails, populations decline, taking pressure off all other sectors of the economy. As existing political arrangements collapse, finally, new regimes take their place, and like all new regimes these can be counted on to put stability at the top of their agendas. Thus we’re facing a period of crisis perhaps a quarter century long, followed by a period of renewed stability, with another round of crises waiting in the wings. Historically speaking, this is how civilizations fall, in a stair-step process alternating periods of crisis with breathing spaces at progressively lower levels of economic and political integration.”
Let’s start with the obvious. While world conventional petroleum production peaked in 2005, unconventional production was hustled into place to pick up the slack, and succeeded in doing so. Since a steady decline in gross availability of fossil fuel energy was the mainspring behind the future I sketched out in this post, the quarter century of chaos I predicted didn’t arrive. That has to be acknowledged up front.
There’s more riding on that than the credibility of one geeky blogger out here on the far fringes of contemporary intellectual culture, after all. One of the reasons so many people roll their eyes at the latest scientific predictions of climate change catastrophe, to name just one glaring example, is that the soi-disant experts who make them never, but never, bother to acknowledge all the many times their previous predictions have fallen flat. That’s true of most modern predictions of impending doom, of course. The apocalyptic end of the peak oil scene was at least as irresponsible as any other when it came to flinging around over-the-top predictions of imminent cataclysm, and then pretending that nobody said anything of the kind once those predictions did a belly flop into the pool of time.
So several of my specific predictions were wrong. I amended those predictions in the years that followed, of course, as I built a more complete analysis of the intricate ways that political, economic, and cultural forces influence the simple reality of fossil fuel depletion. At the same time, those four horsemen and their steeds weren’t simply put out to pasture once tar sands, deepwater wells, hydrofractured shale deposits, and a flurry of other more expensive sources of petroleum got rushed into production to take up the slack as depletion squeezed out the light sweet crude that built the Age of Oil. All four of the factors I discussed have been major forces in shaping the history of the industrial world over the twenty years since that post saw print. Let’s take them one at a time.
My understanding of declining energy availability at that time hadn’t yet taken net energy into consideration. The first reference in my blog posts to that crucial variable was in December 2006, and it took another three years or so for me to integrate the implications fully into my understanding of our predicament. For those who aren’t familiar with it, net energy—also known as energy return on energy invested (EROEI)—is to energy what profit is to a business: it’s what’s left over once you subtract the energy inputs needed for extraction, refining, and distribution from the total energy in one unit (say, a barrel of oil) of a given resource. Just as some businesses are more profitable than others, some energy resources have higher net energy than others.
We’ll get into the fine details in an upcoming post. The thing that needs to be kept in mind for now is that declining net energy has the same effect on a society that declining profit has on a business. In both cases, expenses still have to be met on a shrinking budget, so corners get cut, maintenance gets deferred, grand plans for expansion have to be set aside, and nothing quite works right. Long before either one reaches the crisis point where the remaining profit can no longer meet expenses, it’s obvious to any unbiased observer that things have gone wrong. If all this reminds you of the state of the Western industrial nations these days, let’s just say that you’re not the only one to have noticed this.
My take on economic contraction, similarly, had not yet factored in the ways that politics and economics are inextricably interwoven in a complex society. In my defense, this is a pervasive problem with economics generally, and also with political science: economists generally act as though politics doesn’t affect their field, political scientists return the favor, and both end up babbling nonsense. Once upon a time these were a single field, known as political economy; that was the subject about which Adam Smith, the founder of capitalist economics, wrote so cogently in The Wealth of Nations—and notice how this title itself unites the economic concept of wealth with the political concept of nationhood!
The difficulty, of course, is that once you treat politics and economics as two sides of the same coin, it becomes very difficult to avoid noticing just how much of modern political and economic life has been skewed out of shape, either to justify current systems of privilege and profiteering or to prop up the claims of pressure groups who just want to grab more of the pie for themselves. (Most people who quote Karl Marx approvingly, for example, belong to this latter group.) Grasp the explanatory power of political economy and it also becomes very hard to avoid noticing the increasing disconnection of notional wealth from the hard reality of goods and services, or to ignore the fantastic metastasis of hallucinatory pseudowealth that props up the illusion of economic growth in an era when actual goods and services are being whittled away to nothing by shrinkflation, product crapification, and the like.
All this has helped shape the way that economic contraction has played out over the last twenty years. Here in the United States, homelessness is pervasive, entry-level jobs are all but impossible to find, and big corporations are importing millions of illegal immigrants as an indentured labor force because paying Americans a living wage would involve higher costs than their business models will handle. On paper, the economy is booming; outside the world of economic abstractions, by contrast, most American communities are in worse shape now than they were at the bottom of the Great Depression.
All things considered, collapsing public health has followed my model much more closely, and the beginning of serious depopulation is much closer at this point than anyone expected twenty years ago, Partly, the decay of goods and services just described has had at least as much impact on health care as on any other economic sector; partly, rationing by price has become pervasive in the United States as health care costs and insurance bills soar out of reach of most people, while nations with socialized medical systems resort instead to rationing by sheer bureaucratic inertia—“Sorry, ma’am, the soonest we can get you an appointment is November of 2027.” While official media outlets avoid talking about the subject, many more people these days can name people they know who died prematurely or are on their way to that grim destination. Nor is there any reason to think that this will change in our lifetimes, or for a long time to come.
Finally, I don’t imagine that anybody will deny the explosive spread of political turmoil across the industrial world. Here in the United States, the peace that the Roosevelt administration brokered between the old investment class and the rising corporate-bureaucratic managerial elite has broken down completely in a flurry of bitterly contested elections, legal charges, and brief (so far) outbursts of murderous violence. Elsewhere in the industrial West, conditions are no better, and the possibility that domestic insurgency or civil war will break out in several Western countries in the next decade or so is increasingly hard to reject out of hand.
Meanwhile wars rage all around the European periphery—Ukraine, the Persian Gulf, the former French colonies in Saharan Africa—and anyone who dismisses out of hand the possibility of another major European war in the decades ahead is frankly deluding themselves. All of this, again, is the necessary consequence of the breakdown of the old system under which abundant fossil-fueled largesse was handed out to all and sundry, and unfolds (if in a less direct fashion than I once expected) from the decline in energy availability via decreasing net energy.
The fifth paragraph cited above, I think, counts at one and the same time as the most prescient and the most mistaken part of my 2006 prediction. I was right, of course, that industrial society wouldn’t come apart completely in a single, irrevocable catastrophe, of the sort that true believers in imminent apocalypse have been predicting for every imaginable reason all along. I was wrong that things would spin far enough out of control to give rise to a quarter century or so of chaos, followed by a period of recovery. Put another way, I was right that the inherent stability of the existing system would be strong enough to pull the world out of crisis in due time, and wrong in thinking that it was weak enough to allow a combined crisis on the scale I had in mind.
This doesn’t mean, mind you, that we dodged any kind of a bullet. What happened, to continue the metaphor, is that instead of the bullet I expected, we got hit with birdshot and are bleeding from a great many nonfatal but significant wounds. Frantic bandaging by governments and important business sectors slowed the loss of blood markedly, but one consequence of this response to potential crisis was that many changes that might have led to the recovery I predicted have not happened, or have been confined to a much smaller scale and a more delayed timeline than I expected.
Crisis, it turns out, has its advantages. When things fall apart in an undeniable way, political and economic systems quite often have to make changes that were necessary all along, and those changes can lay the foundations for improved conditions in the future. The sort of slow grind downward we’ve all experienced over the last two decades is another matter. In situations of that kind, political and economic elites can blunder cluelessly onward, burbling to themselves that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds, while troubles pile up to the breaking point for those outside the airtight bubbles of the well-to-do.
It’s by way of the resulting detachment from reality, I suggest, that we get the blind rage the privileged have displayed so embarrassingly often when working class voters, say, vote for someone their soi-disant betters dislike. There’s going to be much more of that in the years ahead, of course. Of our two major parties in the United States, one has already been taken over by populist dissidents, and the other is desperately struggling to prevent a comparable fate. It’s a losing battle, since the only thing the political mainstream has to offer is yet more rounds of giveaways for the well-to-do and austerity for everyone else, but the struggle won’t be quick or easy in any case, and it may not remain even as bloodless as it’s been so far.
All in all, then, the four metaphoric horsemen whose trajectory I tried to sketch out in that long-ago post are present and accounted for, even though the routes they took as they galloped through the last two decades were by and large not the ones I expected. Much more can be said about each of these four factors, and indeed I had much more to say about all of them in a followup sequence of posts in 2006. I’m going to do the same thing this time around, devoting at least one post to each of the four factors just named, and reviewing the essays from 2006 in which I tried to anticipate where things were headed. In the process, I hope to offer a clearer sense of where we are now, and where we can expect to go next, as we slide further down the ragged curve of the Long Descent.
Regarding the prospect of another major European War, do you think that nuclear weapons will act as a deterrent though? One author I like believes that were it not for the invention of nuclear weapons, there would have been three additional world wars in the 20th Century each one deadlier than the last.
Regarding the contraction of industrial economics, there has been a meme going around that England has become a Mediterranean country: hot, arid summers, a stagnant economy, short-lived ministries, and a good football team!
JMG,
My guesses about the future effects of peak oil back in 2006 were heavily influenced by my youth in the 1970’s. Back then the response to reduced oil supplies and higher petroleum prices were things such as fuel rationing, smaller more efficient cars, do-it-yourself solar water heating systems, and lower speed limits on the highways.
So when peak oil became a big deal in 2005-2006 my brain was trained to expect the same sort of thing. I spent a lot of time and money in my business designing and certifying a new clean burning wood stove ( the wood stove industry boomed in the 1970’s) and. I made other plans assuming that the future would resemble the past.
Of course cars did not get smaller, we didn’t bring back sensible passenger rail, and wood stove use did not take off ( but withered away due to local air pollution issues). Instead out health care system became rapidly more expensive before entering the period of financial collapse we have seen recently. Our overblown education institutions have entered rapid collapse territory and financial and technological flip flams and Bezzles have proliferated.
I thought America’s obsession with drive-thru food would collapse with high fuel prices but instead the biggest event in my town in the last month was the opening of a giant In and Out Burger drive thru. Peak oil has not had the near term effects many of us thought it would, but they all make sense when you really study it. My guess is that there are many unexpected things to come in the years ahead.
Good overview. Now for my conspiracy theory thoughts. IMO there is a nebulous group of the elite I call the globalists or Atlanticists. The Atlanticists as the Atlantic lies between the North American and European segments of the group. I believe Tolkien referred to them in this quote.
“The main mark of modern governments is that we do not know who governs, de facto any more than de jure. We see the politician and not his backer; still less the backer of the backer; or, what is most important of all, the banker of the backer.”
This group as the brightest and best in their own eyes think they should order the world. To their frustration the native populations of their countries are getting restless, fossil fuels are declining, and for differing reasons, Russia, Iran and China are beyond their control. So Russia is lured into a war and Iran is subjected to one and China is too big of a whale for ready frying and has its own contrary plans for world dominance as explained in the book – The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower
And this drama is being played out while in the background resource shortages, ecosystem degradation, climate change, and birth collapse are chugging along.
@1 Gunstone
I think European NATO countries will learn that the US nuclear umbrella was a bluff all along. I know France and Britain have nukes of their own (though JMG said that Britain’s are really owned by the US), so most of the battles won’t be taking place on their soil. I also don’t know if US nukes stationed in Europe can be seized when the US is forced to withdraw from the region in the years ahead.
Kudos for giving such a detailed breakdown of incorrect or at least not entirely correct predictions!
I recently saw an interview in the German newspaper ZEIT with a Harvard processor who helped in Obama’s first campaign. He is very frustrated with both political parties and says it seems the parties only think about convincing voters to vote for them without giving them any real reason to do so. His words aren’t far from what you write here: political parties don’t seem to be interested in rule by the people (paraphrasing from memory). His recipe for success is listening to voters in person, not online, though that seems unlikely to happen soon.
Great post John!
I discovered peak oil in 2003 when I turned 18.
In many ways I would be surprised by how much has not changed in 2026. Sure on many metrics outside the very privileged bubbles things are getting worse but in many ways things are still “normal” quote unquote.
Whether that continues into the mid 2040s I’m sceptical.
Many key points seem to turn around 2030 e.g. outright population contraction starts in 2029 according to the EU, the US social security funds effectively runs out around 2030, overall global oil production is expected to peak in 2030 etc.
One of my best financial sources i follow who use elliot wave theory as their tool expects a massive crash in US markets around 2030.
To an extent we lucked out the last 20 years or so but that time is running out.
You got the timing wrong but the predictions seem to me to have held pretty well over the years. Divination that includes the right time frame is divine by nature, hence the name. 😉
I work in horticulture, the conversations about low-energy usage, appropriate technology, practical low-tech serviceable tools are now everyday conversations. I am cautiously optimistic that this economic sector will be muddling through this entropic tidal wave without drifting to far into deep, dark depths.
Yogi Berra — ‘It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.’
You and I go way back, I was pestering you back in your Blogger days and I remember reading this back then. I agreed with you then, though I wasn’t as bold as you were in defining the timeline, but then I felt I was sophisticated enough through years of work in the military and commercial sector of the economy to understand that Cheop’s Law (*) is nearly universal in large organizations.
Overall, I am pretty happy that you were both right and wrong (as are most humans) as in my dotage I realize that I am probably not going to be around when the s***show gets serious. But the realization that the slope of a sine wave is both negative and positive is important in and of itself. Mostly you just pissed of the true believers of the cult of James T. Kirk.
______________________________
(*) Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.
What are your thoughts on the futures of the decaying imperial core of the US vs nations that are mostly agricultural/non industrial? Are they ahead of the curve? And would it be worth it to jump ship from the US now or is this a drastic measure?
Perhaps an explanation is in order as to why different sides are destroying each others energy supplies? We see Iran targeting GCC countries, Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, destroying oil tankers, Ukraine targeting Russian refineries, destroying Russian oil tankers. If oil is the lifeblood to our way of life, why destroy it?
Or is it as simple as what Albert Einstein once said: “Two things are infinite, the universe and HUMAN STUPIDITY and i’m not sure about the universe”
My guess is that in 20 years (probably earlier) it will be no longer possible to produce enough fossil fuels and energy to maintain business as usual let alone sustain economic growth (make more stuff) The EROI drops too much.
(@JMG– This comment might be too long. The issue is near to my heart and I was trying to get my thoughts out. Let me know if it’s too much and I’ll break it up or post it to my own blog or something.)
I was one of those who, in the early days of the Peak Oil movement, expected something like an apocalypse. Indeed, I was an “anarcho-primitivist” (remember those?) and fully expected to be living in a hunter-gatherer tribe, hunting deer with a bow under the ruins of skyscrapers, by this time. Of course, those fantasies turned out to just be ways to avoid dealing with my own problems, as they were for most people. (For others, they were opportunities to avoid dealing with their own personal problems by creating cults and abusing their followers. Lookin’ at you, Messrs Jensen and Zerzan.)
Well, we didn’t get the hunter-gatherer tribes hunting deer in the ruins of cities whose populations had conveniently died off stage. What we got has been much less dramatic and in some ways less pleasant.
Thinking about it, the changes that I’ve noticed from the early 2000s to today can be classed under four headings, grouped in pairs.
1. Scammification and Crappification
I was born in 1983, and a great many of those things which were still normal parts of life during my adolescence have, simply put, become scams run by shysters and con artists. College is the most obvious example. When I was strong-armed into signing up for student loans in the year 2001 they were already usurious, and mine still aren’t paid off. Within a few years, our government went ahead and made them non-dischargable in bankruptcy. To the surprise of no one (and the delight of a few), the price of college immediately skyrocketed. I’m just old enough for a pile of non-dischargable loans to be a burden, but not one which keeps me from living a fairly comfortable life. Those just a few years younger than me are not so lucky.
Similarly, when I was a kid, we still had a family doctor. He knew our names, spent time with us, and made sure that we ate well and took vitamins. He was an osteopath, and also performed chiropractic-like adjustments as needed. When I had a muscular issue from carrying boxes at my first job, he taught me how to do trigger-point therapy, a type of massage and the obvious go-to for issues like this, and recommended with a wink that I have my girlfriend perform it every day. In the decades since, I’ve worked as a massage therapist, and I’ve more than once had clients tell me that doctors had recommended surgery for the same sort of issue.
Meanwhile, products which used to be reliable are now useless, built to break, and– when they’re edible– often toxic. When I was a kid, people still regularly repaired their own cars. And the Cold War was close enough in memory that we would mock the ludicrously bad quality of Soviet-bloc products, especially cars. Just a few decades before I was born, Richard Nixon and Nikita Khruschev held the famous “kitchen debate,” in which Nixon demonstrated a modern American kitchen, with appliances providing reliable convenience, and pointed out that any American worker could afford to buy such a home for his family. Now, of course, few American workers can afford a home. New homes are shoddily built of flimsy materials, the appliances that fill them are designed to expensive enough to require a loan to purchase but shoddy enough to break as soon s they are paid off. And don’t get me started on cars. The difference between today’s America and Khruschev’s Russia seems to be that, in the Soviet Union, collective enterprises tried to produce good quality products but failed. In today’s America, our corporate enterprises try to produce bad quality products, and succeed.
2. Extremification and Enstupidization
Meanwhile, our politics has become marked, as everyone knows, by ideologies which are both extreme in their hostility toward the half of the country that votes the other way and marked by extraordinary stupidity. The extremism regularly rises to violent hatred and a desire to see the other side destroyed utterly. The stupidity takes the form both of historical ignorance and a complete inability to grasp basic logic.
I was recently talking with a Gen Z coworker who checks all the boxes of the “modern white liberal.” “Woke,” in a “queer relationship,” repeats the usual slogans about race and gender. I suggested to her once that I was concerned that the rising political tensions in the USA could lead to a situation like the Troubles in Ireland. She had no idea what I was talking about and seemed shocked to learn that there had ever been an issue in Ireland. Aren’t the Irish white?
Meanwhile, the ideologies which have taken hold of both “Left” and “Right” are consistently based both on nonsense history and on terrible logic, with the two reinforcing each other. A typical argument from the Left starts by talking about abuses of power by (certain) white people at (certain) places at times. Or, in logical terms, “Some X are Y” (Some of those who have committed abuses of power are white.) It then jumps to “All X are Y” (all those who commit abuses of power are white), and from, there to “All Y are X” (All whites commit abuses of power.) For whites, we may substitute men, Christians, “Westerners,” or whoever might be the enemy du jour. All of that, of course, is the standard “Woke” party line, and it amounts to nothing more than claiming that 2 + 2 = 12. Nor do the Woke ever get around to noticing that American blacks share a common culture and history (or did until the recent waves of immigration from Somalia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and so on), while American “whites” are divided among various groups with different cultures and histories (Puritan-WASP; Southern Cavalier-WASP; Appalachian Scots-Irish, Ethnic Roman Catholic; German Protestant; Minnesota-Scandanavian; and a dozen others). Comparing “blacks” to “whites” thus amounts to comparing a species to a genus, but no one ever seems to notice this.
Not to be outdone, elements of the Right have taken up the same line of reasoning, swapping out whites for Jews, blacks, women, or whoever might be their own enemy du jour.
All these trends amount to a giant mess. It’s very hard to untangle, because no one seems to have the political power to stop scammification and crappification, and no one with a public platform seems to have the intelligence to think their own way out of extremification and enstupidization, let alone to help others to do so. It’s much duller and much dumber than the silly fantasies of hunting deer amid the ruins of skyscrapers. But it seems to be where we’re at.
We’ve all underestimated how much toothpaste is in a tube. Even in my country, Germany—where I live and which isn’t exactly known for its abundance of natural resources—there are 0.7 to 2.3 trillion cubic meters of recoverable fracking gas, which people will surely turn to sooner or later if there’s a serious economic crisis. If necessary, they’ll send the army to the gas fields to plunder them. There are simply too many people who benefit from the status quo and become very creative when it comes to preserving their own lifestyle. These are probably the two factors that have contributed most to the fact that life doesn’t look all that different from what it did 20 years ago—only now with smartphones that suggest something like eternal technological progress.
I’m really looking forward to this series.
It seems to be more of a decay and decline, rather than a collapse per se.
Europe has seen contraction as the result the loss of cheap Russian energy. (They still buy Russian energy, but through a middleman or two.) If world energy prices rise due to middle east conflicts, I wonder how we will fare? I suspect a decline in lifestyle, but we shall see. Debt can mask a lot.
Of course there is every incentive incentive to maintain business as usual. For instance Argentina is in the middle of its own fracking boom.Turning the country into a petroleum exporter Venezuela great reserves of nasty hard to refine oil will be exploited.. The future loss of business as usual may be postponed longer than expected, at my age perhaps until I am safely in the grave.
Considering that Trump is still supporting establishment Republicans like Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, and John Thune and kicked out the anti-establishment populists like Tulsi Gabbard, I highly doubt that populists have actually taken over the Republican Party and control it today.
Top of the morning to you John!
Wow, reading the old post it struck me how much fire and brimstone your younger self had in him. Mind you it was hedged and thoughtful. Still compared to today it burns bright.
Also regarding your comment about population decline, just this last few days I saw a national news outlet in Europe openly posting an official statement of the European commission that the population is getting old, is on the verge of shrinking. And that the only possible solution is to bring in more immigrants in order to keep the economy afloat. It is my summary, but it might as well be verbatim. And the response to the article in the comment section was open discussion of how bad the life has gotten in the last 3 decades of joining the EU.
Another event was me attending a high school graduation and one of the speakers urged the graduates to “Please consider having families. We know it is hard, but long term you will find it worth it.”
Hmm thinking about it. I have thought and integrated this for the last 20 years, but now everybody well knows it, it is seeping into the awareness. The decline. It has brought nothing to me, but to be the weird guy on the edge who can do nothing but watch.
What might it do, when the whole society sees it. Or will the point of it be missed again.
Best regards,
V
@10 Roldstar
Ukraine’s & Iran’s actions are not that stupid. They don’t want their enemies to have the economic lifeblood of oil while they’re still warring with them.
Thank you John for your honesty and insightful commentary. In researching the long decline, I too have been ahead of the curve in my preparations and expectations. From my perspective, there is no downside to this. Simplifying my life, (collapse now and avoid the rush), gardening, foraging, developing skills, etc. all have been positive for my physical and mental health. In preparing for a decline in government services, taking care of my health is a very high priority.
It is better to be a few years early in this program than a day late. Many of the skills have a longer learning curve than generally appreciated.
The Chanterelle mushrooms are flushing here in Western Maine, the beans are in blossom, life is as rich and fulfilling as we make it.
I look forward to the upcoming posts.
Tom
You did indeed nail the health care situation very neatly to the wall. There is an overlap there with the encrapification of the food supply. The need to keep food prices down is certainly a factor in the highly-processed Advanced Food Substitutes on the store shelves as well in all the herbicides and pesticides flung around the farm. That keeps production costs down and the processing extends shelf life. The side effect is Type 2 diabetes and probably a bunch of allergies and immune problems that were rare when I was young.
In a related note this is in the news this morning, “Steiner expects prices to remain higher than last year but said growers should not expect soft white wheat to reach $7 per bushel.
The Washington Association of Wheat Growers estimates the general break-even price for farmers at approximately $7.71 per bushel.”
https://www.yoursourceone.com/columbia_basin/report-local-wheat-prices-may-peak-below-farmers-costs/article_32121873-6954-47ff-836a-7c9903877429.html
And that leads to energy. The Washington State “save the climate” carbon tax raised the price of diesel. There was no agricultural exemption.
In the Labor market the mass retirement of the Boomers is spoiling everyone’s statistical models. The trailing edge of the peak of the body boom was 1959, that group reaches Full Benefits Age this year.
But Management remains clueless. The replies to this article are definitely not sympathetic.
https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/07/13/0443258/america-may-soon-be-facing-largest-labor-shortage-in-its-history
Back on Energy, supposedly the US still has 80-odd years of natural gas reserves left. At what price is a fair question though. The AI boondoggle may shorten that a bit. Fracking is more effective at gas extraction than it is at oil, it’s a simple matter of viscosity.
https://profession.americangeosciences.org/collections/geoscience-faq/how-much-natural-gas-does-united-states-have-and-how-long-will-it-last/
JMG, “Of our two major parties in the United States, one has already been taken over by populist dissidents, and the other is desperately struggling to prevent a comparable fate. ” I think I can do a reasonable post mortem of recent political events in the State of Maine, The Senate candidate, now withdrawn, was hated, I think the word is not too strong, by Dem. pooh bahs for two reasons. One is that the guy is a walking example of the effect our wars of choice are having on the men and women we send to fight them. The other is that, faults, rough edges and all, the guy showed up. Town halls, meeting the ordinary public all over the state. Something which the other so-called ‘progressives’ have not done. We hear about “telling your truth”, I think that is the phrase. Well, scruffy Mainers with bad teeth and thrift store wardrobes were telling their truths about how fashionable neo-liberal policies were hurting them and destroying their communities. And there was the candidate, a guy who has the ability to explain political and economic realities in ordinary, easy to understand terms, connecting the dots and explaining how their lives had been wrecked, and, no, it wasn’t their fault the factory left town. I wish the candidate had run as an independent, not needing Democratic Central Committee support.
As for the alleged scandal, IMO, if you are victim of a crime, you need to report said crime ASAP, so that suspects can be arrested and evidence gathered. I have no liking for Justice Cavanaugh, shallow social climber, IMO, but I also disbelieved his accuser, whose “trauma” didn’t prevent her having a successful career in academia.
Gunstone, nuclear weapons are old technology. They certainly prevented some wars in their time, but rapid advances in antimissile and antiaircraft technology make their successful deployment increasingly unlikely in the future. What’s more, the US isn’t going to step up to Europe’s defense at this point, and the immense imbalance between Europe’s tiny arsenals and Russia’s far vaster stockpile of nukes leaves Europe no deterrence to speak of. It hardly matters if Britain, say, can get a handful of nukes to a handful of Russian targets, when Russia could easily saturate Britain with so many air bursts that the six-week survival figure would be something less than 0.5% of prewar population. As for the meme, it’s good that they’ve noticed; what I don’t think most people realize yet is that Britain may slip past the Mediterranean and end up as a West African nation before long.
Clay, that was one of the main things that misled me, too. Unexpected consequences? Very much en route.
BeardTree, yes, that sounds like Tolkien. It amuses me that so many people don’t realize just how very far on the right wing he was. As for “Atlanticists,” to my mind that’s an oversimplification, though sometimes a useful one. The crucial point is that the American salary class by and large is loyal to its class and not its country, and like American elites since colonial days, has a powerful sentimental attachment to Europe and an uncritical admiration of European institutions.
Aldarion, I’m delighted that common sense of that kind is making its way into media as mainstream as Zeit. Maybe somebody will notice.
Forecasting, I recall a great many people making identical claims about 2000, and then about 2012 — and in the wake of 2012, I predicted that 2030 would be the next magnet for such fantasies. Still, we’ll see.
Rashakor, I’m delighted to hear this! It’s from those practical conversations, not from grand abstract syntheses, that a viable future is most likely to emerge.
Degringolade, yeah, you’re one of the few! You’re right, though: it hadn’t occurred to me back then that Cheops’s law also applies to the decline and fall of civilizations — those don’t happen on schedule or within budget either.
Subotai, actually, the US is ahead of the curve right now — many nonindustrialized nations will respond to the end of Western hegemony with partial industrializations of their own, especially if they have frackable shales or other energy resources. The best place to be for the middle term is in a place that’s already well into decline, so long as it’s not along likely invasion routes or subject to too much desertification.
Rodster, access to air is essential to human life, and yet choking your opponent is a good solid tactic in a bar fight. The same principle applies here.
BeardTree, oh, business as usual is fading out slowly around us already. A lot of things that were business as usual 20 years ago aren’t too easy to find now, for that matter. You’re quite correct that declining net energy is behind this.
Steve, those two headings make very good extended commentaries to my notes on economic contraction and political turmoil. In both cases, we got decline instead of collapse, but that doesn’t make it any easier.
Executed, yep. Of course once the frackable gas has been extracted and sold, the brief boom is over, and then you have the poisoned groundwater and all the other fun consequences to deal with.
Tom, exactly. “Decline, not collapse” has been my basic thesis for quite a long while now.
BeardTree, of course. But that postponement won’t prevent a great deal of decline.
Anon, like most people, you’re looking through the wrong end of the telescope. The top end of the pyramid is the last to change. Go check out what’s happening at the grassroots, or simply notice who’s winning primaries at this point.
Vitranc, I was much younger in those days and, predictably, much less cautious. As for population collapse, I’m delighted that people are talking about it. It may still turn into another missed opportunity, but we’ll see.
Tom, delighted to hear it. I heartily agree — my own sustained process of collapsing ahead of the rush has already given me a happier, healthier, and less stressful life. Huzzah for the chanterelles and the bean flowers!
Siliconguy, welcome to the future, where economic activity no longer pays its own costs. More on this as we proceed!
Mary, exactly. The Democratic Party is moving toward civil war between the old guard and the rising populist movement, some but not all of which has embraced various flavors of socialism. I expect it to get very ugly as things proceed.
Glad to see the start of this series.
Really, I think your predictions did as well as anyone’s, and a lot better than most. Basically you underestimated how long and gradual the long descent would be, and missed assorted bumps and bounces along the way.
Sure looks a lot more accurate to me than fast collapse. I became seriously aware of/involved with peak oil in 2009, and I overestimated the speed of the collapse far more drastically than you did.
Admittedly I was also panicking because my tendonitis and fibromyalgia problems had become obviously long-term, and I couldn’t DO most of the things I thought I had to do right now to survive the future we were looking at. I thought I would be dead of starvation/exposure/disease related to the former within ten years. Not what has happened at all. I’m in a better position now than I was then, even if I’ve developed eye problems along the way as the tendonitis problems became less severe, then came back, then became less severe again. And this had a huge impact on how I dealt with knowledge of the trouble we were in.
Thank you, JMG! I am really looking forward to reading more about the updated details of the four horsemen. I’m curious about your comment that things are worse than they were in the depths of the Great Depression. Things look very grim to me today, but I guess the Great Depression has a sort of mythic status in my mind and so it feels like nothing could be worse than that. When I think about the infamous breadlines of the Great Depression, I’m sure they don’t look much different than food kitchens or pop up tents that hand out food to homeless people, but the latter have been normalized. But still, I am curious to hear more specific details making the case that things now are as bad as they were then. I don’t know much of the specifics of how things were then, and it feels just about impossible to get any good data an internet search about how things are now…
The point about failing public health really hits home with me. I had a major collapse in my early 20s, a decade ago, and it has made me more attuned to health and the body than I would’ve otherwise been. It feels like I’m watching so many people around me just collapse under the weight of environmental, pharmaceutical, and food toxins, malnutrition, loneliness, stress, inadequate or unaffordable help, and an insistent psychological need to not really acknowledge any of it or what it means about the world they live in. It haunts me to see the weight of it all in their faces.
The other thing I’ve noticed about health is that more and more people are coming to me for remedies and advice. I’m not much more than an intermediate herbalist, although I have spent the better part of the last decade learning all I can about the body. But even though I’m not always going to know enough to help, people still are happy to talk to me and give herbs a shot, and I know it’s because they’re way cheaper, way more empowering, much easier to obtain, and way easier on the body than any option from mainstream “medicine.”
Hi JMG,
That was a very satisfying post.
Here in British Columbia, I just found out yesterday that Dermatologists can no longer afford to provide services that are paid for by our public health system. They have almost all moved to doing botox, beauty procedures and unnecessary plastic surgery. These procedures for the rich are paid for privately.
My husband had an ear infection that was treated with a month of antibiotic ear drops. When the drops stopped, he was in considerable pain. The clinic agreed to see him as an emergency patient in two weeks. He had wanted to go to the clinic in the first place because he thought antibiotics would be a sure cure. I am now treating him with warm drops of garlic and clove in olive oil and steaming his head over a bowl of hot water with oil of oregano (4 drops) both treatments are thee times a day. He has no pain but his ear still feels blocked so we will continue until it feels normal.
A little while ago, I was hyperthyroid and my heart was beating too hard. I began to have substernal pain radiating to my jaw. I asked my husband to drive to the village and buy me some Aspirin from the general store. I chewed up the Aspirin and swallowed it. In about 15 minutes, the pain subsided. At no time did I consider calling an ambulance or driving into town to go to the Emergency Ward. Waiting 6 to 12 hours in the filth of the Emergency Ward did not seem to me a productive use of my time. In Canada, you have to decide if you are willing to die in the Emergency Ward, after an lengthy wait to see a Doctor, or just die in the comfort of your own home.
A neighbour recently collapsed and went to hospital. His wife was told for three days running to come in and say goodbye to him as he was going to die. On the third day, she came in to find a Doctor sitting on her husband’s bed saying, ” Now Robert, you have had three heart surgeries and 18 cancer surgeries. You have been a great drain on our finances. Why don’t you let me give you MAiD (this is short for lethal injection) now?” Robert is a former Canadian Forces Chaplain and he sat up and gave the Doctor a good verbal thrashing. Then, they reviewed his medications and found they had been giving him the wrong heart medication and that is why he had collapsed. He was back home the next day riding around on his lawn tractor cutting the grass.
So much for public health in Canada.
Hugs from Maxine
I became a Doomer in 1970, shortly after taking new courses in Ecology, taught by a young professor at the university I attended. My expectations for the future gradually became more nuanced, partly by reading your new posts about twenty years ago, but my conviction about our eventual destination is largely unchanged.
During all of those years nearly everyone who became aware of my worldview rolled their eyes at it, and dismissed any arguments I might make on its behalf.
Yes, actual events have unfolded more slowly and in less tidy fashion than we might have expected, but they have still shaken most of the non-wealthy out of their complacency. Many now take some sort of dark future for granted, and many more now at least accept the possibility that Pollyanna may have had it wrong.
ENTRY LEVEL JOBS
> entry-level jobs are all but impossible to find
Greetings JMG,
I hope all is well with you.
Born in 1952, graduating high school in 1970, after a disastrous first year of college (although “interesting”), way before computer-anything, I began a series of entry-level jobs called variously as “clerk-typist” and “file-clerk” in back-offices of factories. I was good at filing (bending) and clerking (sitting), but lousy at typing (barely 45 words per minute) (more sitting). Those were the days when females had to wear skirts and dresses in the workplace—no pants. The highest-tech I saw was an electric typewriter; no computers in sight.
(Those days were also the days of rampant sexual harassment by males of females, where girls/women had not even one protection.)
By 1973, a different entry-level job came to the fore: “data-entry.” It relied on typing.
Fast-forward to now, fifty-odd years later (73). My file-clerk-typist skills have come in handy all along.
While I now use a home computer (home-based business), I rely in equal amount on paper, that is, sheets of paper, filing those papers, and typing. Adding in computerized bookkeeping (Cognito’s MoneyWorks-New Zealand), I depend a heck of a lot on paper—for a reason: it is reliable, while computers are not. (If one is bold, one can learn the ‘lost art of manual bookkeeping,’ all on paper.)
The actual work I do now includes many of the same skills as a 1971 clerk-typist. And since I am part of a micro-business (mom and pop), we (supposedly) generate income, profits of which we (supposedly) get to pocket.
‼️No bosses‼️(Unless arguing with my husband qualifies.)
JMG, when you say that entry-level jobs have all but disappeared, which is true. But on a finer level, entry-level work is still there but has been eaten up (like Noah’s whale ate Noah) and been meshed with other roles. One can find the role of, say, clerk-typist, but not by that name, nor paid as such.
The role of clerk-typist has been enveloped as a basic skill used by small business owners. By becoming a small business, one of the top things to know is how to be an entry-level clerk-typist and file-clerk.
Most people know how to type. Buy a used file cabinet. Takes notes of in- and out-phone calls. This is the beginning of making oneself useful; it is how one starts a micro-business.
In my opinion, these days, one can make money as a clerk-typist, but within the role of micro-business-owner. One “owns” a business by starting it.
Eighty percent of small businesses fail in the first three years. Year 1: make a stab. Year 2: in trouble. Year 3: fold. In one’s second year, make sure one is not in trouble.
A big hunk of those failures is underestimating the importance of keeping one’s files organized and thoroughly knowing bookkeeping.
💨🪑🗄️🗂️⌨️🔢💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
P.S. I define micro-business is either one person, or a partnership of two people; small business is ten or less people.
Steve T @ 12: What you said about the Soviet bloc and consumer goods is not quite true. Despite having a much smaller economy and a far lower supply of imperial tribute, the Soviets were competitive with the West in arms and arguably superior in the space and nuclear weapons industries. However they put everything into the war economy, nukes first, then conventional weapons, then the military and security services, and civilians got the scraps left over. The Soviet state did not care if the cars were good; it might have even preferred them to be bad to curb consumerist aspirations. In the 1980s, Soviet engineers put forward many designs for advanced, competitive FWD cars and the government rejected all of them in favor of blowing what money was left on VTOL planes, war in Afghanistan (sounds familiar…), and a space shuttle that was bigger and flashier than the American one and could fly unmanned (it was called Buran, and it actually worked).
You can stick a knife in the Democratic Party. Looks like the establishment Democrats have successfully kicked out the insurgent populists in Maine, and the DSA people supported the establishment’s crusade where it actually mattered.
“As for the meme, it’s good that they’ve noticed; what I don’t think most people realize yet is that Britain may slip past the Mediterranean and end up as a West African nation before long.”
West African in terms of climate, demographics, or governance quality?
@Clay Dennis, #2. I have been heating with wood stoves for 40 years, and very much enjoy the new clean burning ones, so thank you. If you don’t mind sharing, what brand of stove were you working on? Perhaps I own one.
I just read this earlier today as a description of our current situation: “Living in the US is like living with a parent who’s a gambling addict, where the grocery & rent money constantly goes missing at the racetrack.” and then this “”No one is coming to save us” is a call for becoming more self-sufficient. This doesn’t mean we all start homesteading; it means that we, as adults, need to fully grasp the system we’ve been sold into & find ways to be autonomous critical thinkers.” – Kim Cascone
Thanks for looking backwards with this review!
Pygmycory, for what it’s worth, I’m glad things worked out the way they did. You’re one of many people who wouldn’t have survived the crisis I foresaw back then.
Sama, I recommend reading oral histories of the Great Depression — Studs Terkel’s Hard Times is a good starting point — and comparing those with your own experiences and observations. As for health, I’ve watched the same thing. Most people these days realize that outside of serious accidents, you’re better off choosing almost anything other than mainstream American medicine.
Maxine, those are great examples! Yeah, Canada may not surpass America in many things, but its health care is at least as bad as ours, and the enthusiasm with which your medical system tries to talk people into being Murdered At the Instigation of Doctors — that’s what those initials stand for, right? 😉 — is a step beyond what we’ve got so far.
Howard, I’m glad to hear that more of the people you know have been able to extract their heads out of their — er, out of the mythology of inevitable progress! That’s a hopeful sign.
Northwind, microbusinesses are certainly an option, but not a panacea. More on this as we proceed!
Anon, we’ll see, but that’s a very bad sign for the Dems.
Gunstone, yes.
Justin, that’s a good crisp description!
“The crucial point is that the American salary class by and large is loyal to its class and not its country…”
I would like to know, JMG, and also commentariat, if anyone knows of ANY elite class which is NOT primarily loyal to its class, while failing to be loyal to its country – presuming that it’s “country” includes most of the ordinary people who, by and large, lack connections to either wealth and/or power?
Empires have mass and inertia, but once they get to a full stop the mass and inertia works against them… That’s why Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed first have to become nimble to restart. A lot of assets were stripped during that period, same with all Eastern European countries.
That’s why I think playing with the commercial and strategic oil reserves is extremely hapless.
You did well in the predictions department compared to others, and mostly you are among the few that didn’t dropped the subject, 20 years latter I still follow Dmitry Orlov, and sometimes Ran Prieur and Nate Hagens. It was quite a big movement bag then, most of the people dropped the subject, maybe only one I can think of is Ugo Bardi published a few interesting books in the last years
Quite a few people didn’t even make it, I think here Mike Ruppert and other people…
JMG
I’m reminded of a substack article I read a few months back. It discusses how European and later American naval power was central to the expansion of the industrial west and how as of now that naval power has been made obsolete. What he predicts is a breakdown of the global hegemony into regional powers. I think there’s a lot you’d probably agree with albeit from a different angle.
https://steelcutter.substack.com/p/the-great-energy-world-war
If those four horsemen aren’t exactly galloping, they are still walking determinedly on.
I wonder..
if the worst we get for extracting too much of the earths oil is the inability to extract further,
we are incredibly lucky, right?
Or maybe very bad luck for future generations?
I have an awkward feeling about all this..
Robin
@ tankermottind — Thanks. Of course, my actual point was just to note the way that every criticism thrown at the Soviet Union in my childhood applies equally well to the America of my middle years, but I appreciate the datapoint.
@ Justin — For what it’s worth, during the Biopolitical Dictatorship of the early ’20s– er, “Covid”– my wife and I adopted the slogan “No one is coming to help you.” Thinking this way has allowed us to navigate the crisis in much better shape than many I know, and I think it’s the best approach to life in modern America.
Predictions of the future about the effects of peak oil never seem to take into account the Oligarchy that includes the British Royal Family, the Rothschild’s, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, etc.
These groups desire to shape the future seem to be about massive population reduction, and brutal control of the few people who remain.
If circumstances were left to run a natural course, I believe the human population would strip the world of virtually everything edible and burnable. Considering that would destroy THEIR World, I feel that a great poisoning is coming that will be portrayed as another pandemic. That would seem to be the only way to eliminate most of humanity without the damage to the ecosystem.
JMG, could you expand a bit on what you have meant when you say, “business will no longer be profitable” or will lose money in the near to mid future? (I thought about this, and my reaction was, son-of-a-gun, I think he is right!) Do you mean that, if you want to print a book, you are going to be doing it (as a business or not) on a machine like this?
https://printinghistory.org/hand-press-crawl/
Or not at all, for profit? So either retro arrangement, or no profit? Or do you mean, rather, that eventually even retro business models will go down the tubes?
Thank you! And thank you for going over this again. As a longtime regular reader, it is continually astounding to me how many people breeze into the blog, and then get huffy or pompous about some point that you have commented on a hundred times, and clarified almost to perfection (if you have been here listening, awhile).
“we got hit with birdshot and are bleeding from a great many nonfatal but significant wounds.”
most def
Hi John,
I don’t think 2030 is the end of the world, rather a step change in the process of decline.
I would argue we had a similar moment around 2020 (partly hidden by the covid lockdown hysteria).
It is interesting how many serious government and corporate analysis on various issues target 2030 as a crisis point or where things get seriously unsustainable.
@Steve T: I hope family members and friends can continue to help each other, but I do agree about that phrase.
1930s GREAT DEPRESSION
Sama Lindera 24
> I don’t know much of the specifics of how things were then
One way to become familiar with how it felt in the 1930s Great Depression (“depression”) is to try to go without food for 48 hours. Drink water, room-temperature, but don’t eat.
Then multiple that 48 hours by a thousand days.
My mother was born in 1926. She spent her childhood during the depression, and used to talk about it — a lot. Those years negatively affected every fiber of her being for the rest of her life. A mild word for those years is “austerity.”
💨🚰💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Scotlyn, well, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I don’t conflate a political system with the poorer 80% or so of the people it rules, as you’re trying to do here. What I mean is that historically, most elite classes support their class and the political system it dominates — consider the British aristocracy of the Victorian era, who certainly put their class interests front and center but were also by and large pretty jingoistic in their defense of Britain and its imperial claims. That’s the thing that’s emphatically not true of US and European managerial elites. They lack any patriotic sense at all, and would be just as happy if their countries were to be conquered by somebody else so long as they got to keep or improve their current status. That’s an unusual state for an elite class to be in.
Archivist, oh, there’s definitely a major game of chicken being played with strategic oil reserves. We’ll see who wins the gamble. As for peak oil, yes, and I’ll have a few things to say about that down the road a bit.
Anon, whether or not naval power has become obsolete is a fascinating question; at the moment, it certainly looks as though it’s off the board for great-power wars, but we’ll see. He’s right, though, that a breakup of the global chessboard into regional economic and political theaters is inescapable at this point.
Renaissance Man, as we used to say back in the heyday of the peak oil movement, depletion never sleeps, and neither do its consequences.
5Flycatcher, but that’s not the worst we get — not by a long shot. We’ll discuss that further in later posts.
Bob, one of the reasons most students of peak oil don’t use that sort of paranoiac analysis of history is that it consistently yields false predictions. Go back twenty years or so on any of the websites that push that sort of scapegoating, note down the predictions that appeared there, and then see how many of them flopped. (Spoiler: it’s a very high percentage.) A theory that won’t yield accurate guidance is best chucked into the dumpster, no matter how emotionally satisfying it may be to insist that it’s true.
Celadon, we’ll be going over this in great detail in upcoming posts, but here’s the short form. The only reason business activity on average yields a profit is economic growth. If the economy were to reach a steady state, on average, businesses would break even, and once it begins to decline, businesses on average lose money year over year. The vast metastasis of imaginary wealth through debt manufacture in today’s world is an attempt to paper over actual contraction in the real economy of actual goods and nonfinancial services — that’s why no matter how much more money you make, your real, nonfinancial standard of living keeps slipping. For a while, technological retrovation will help cushion that by cutting costs, but sooner or later that won’t help any longer. That’s why in every civilization in decline, economic activity spirals down to the subsistence level, money drops out of use, and the idea of making a profit (as distinct from earning a living) goes away for centuries.
Forecasting, well, we’ll see!
@Northwind Grandma (#27):
I’m 10 years older than you, and one telling thing that I noticed over those years is precisely about “typing.” Public schools had typing classes, and they were only for girls. And it was only women who were hired as typists.
Then along came computers, and boys/men had to use actual keyboards.. Did the men call what they did on those keyboards “typing?” No, of course not! What the males did was universally called “keyboarding,” never “typing,” back then — “typing” was for females only. Now, if I’m not mistaken, everyone “keyboards,” men and women alike. Or can both sexes finally “type” on their computers now?
And on a related note … One of the things that became apparent to me over almost 40 years teaching in my university was how the male-female ratio of undergraduates in any given major was subject to very sudden change, but only in one direction: male undergraduates tended rapidly to flee any major as soon as it began to attract lots of female undergraduates, yielding a rather sudden change in the enrollment ratio.
So stupid!
I was 16 in 1973 and taking driver’s ed when the first Arab oil embargo hit. With gas lines and alternate day “rationing” I wondered why I should bother getting a driving license. I would say that my whole life since then has been lived with the certainty that oil was a limited resource and that some day we would run out of it.
The goal of my youth was to homestead with the hippies and work on alternative energy. I worked as an auto mechanic to learn practical skills (the first female auto mechanic in Austin, TX!) and then went back to school to study engineering. There I learned for real that there were no viable alternatives to fossil fuels. And encountered the term peak oil for the first time in the 1980s. Catton’s Overshoot and the Olduvai theory made an impression.
I forgot about that for awhile and worked as a forest protection advocate for over a decade. Can we save enough wild nature to keep a core of biodiversity alive until the oil runs out and our human destructive capacity is reduced? I am still not sure about that.
Now my goal in life is to keep developing homesteading skills and sharing what I learn with younger people as a legacy for the future. I write about it at Substack under The Biochar Prepper if you are interested.
My big debate at the moment is whether or not to invest in lithium batteries for my grid-tied solar system. I will do fine without electricity because I have a hand pump for water and plenty of wood for heating and cooking, but keeping the lights on and my freezer and frig working during an extended power outage would be really nice. However, I am so appalled by the impact of mining lithium and nickel and other metals that I don’t want to contribute to that problem. Not sure what I will do.
I have always been amazed at the prevalence of energy blindness across all social and political divisions. Most people cannot conceive of an end to industrial civilization and progress. They have no concept of the second law of thermodynamics, even though it is just common sense. However, I think our predicament is finally hitting home with a lot of people. These days when I talk about the future with people, I just say, “I think in 100 years we will be lucky if we live as well as the Amish,” and people nod their heads in agreement. They still don’t want to talk about it though.
A final note on health – I believe that is one of the biggest benefits of my years of prepping. Eating home grown food, eschewing pharmaceuticals, and a physical lifestyle has left me in good health at this age. I have not been to a doctor in years.
Best wishes to all on our journey into the future, and thanks to our host and others who have not let go of these topics despite widespread ignorance everywhere you look.
Hello, JMG and commentariat, I’m here again.
First of all, you look very cool in your first photo, John, dressed as a Druid. Now, more seriously, I think it’s interesting and necessary to revisit your own ideas, comparing them with real world facts…It seems it’s a good attitude to avoid fanaticism and loss of contact with reality (too common online and offline nowadays, methink).
“As oil depletion accelerates, and other resources such as fissionable uranium and Eurasian natural gas hit their own production peaks, the shortfall widens,”
“Peak uranium” is an elephant in the room for hard style nuclear power supporters. They usually avoid to be “engulfed” by this unpleasant reality dreaming with nuke plants in a “near” future, which would work using thorium or plutonium, or “angels feathers”, to jump the gap into the always promising nuclear fusion (?). Available commercial fusion plants are always just around the corner…unless you’re one of those awful old school hippies (ha-ha).
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“Many of today’s political institutions will not survive the end of cheap energy, and the changeover to new political arrangements will likely involve violence. International affairs face similar realignments”
Sad, but IMHO true. A sign of times, in addition to your phrase, is how some western “thinkers” and elites members have started to praise the “good governance” in China, especially since the COVID pandemic (cough). I’m thinking in books written by, for example, Daniel A. Bell and Joshua Cooper (ahem), clapping for the Chinese model. Even there’s another term which seems to be the opposite of the “old” “Washington Consensus”, the “Beijing Consensus”. There aren’t much people yet, but as soon as China gets stronger in a near future, there will be more…
It’s evident next candidate to be the “global hegemon” is China, but its current political government and economical system aren’t anyway democratic nor unfallible in the long term. Only the western decline (especially within the awful EU bureaucratic system), allows some people to pretend China is a model for another countries.
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“Once upon a time these were a single field, known as political economy;”
Yes, a “legendary” science, less accurated that “hard” sciences, but indeed a real science. I also think politics are economy, too; and economy is politics, too.
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“nations with socialized medical systems resort instead to rationing by sheer bureaucratic inertia”
Yes, I’ve been seeing this tendence here in state funded “health” services since some years ago. Crappification is moving forward…
Regarding business not being able to earn a profit: I don’t think we’re there yet. What businesses are running into is that they can’t turn a profit AND pay all the lenocrats. Note that in Siliconguy’s original post the farmers are losing money because they have to pay a carbon tax on their diesel fuel. The question becomes whether the lenocrats will reduce some of their burden…or hang on to their cut and force the businesses to fail or go underground.
(I’ve been along for the ride on a couple of business failures. One thing I’ve observed is that when a company is starting out there’s not a finance person in sight, but the last guys out the door at the end are the chief financial officer and the company lawyer, all the productive staff having left or been fired long ago.)
Hi JMG,
Glad to see you returning to your ADR roots here. Great stuff. Also, good for you for revisiting predictions that didn’t pan out as originally envisioned. Getting one’s head around the whole peak oil conundrum is tough enough–it’s very very hard to come out the other side with a sophisticated, nuanced view about what might happen next. I have certainly been wrong about impending catastrophe for many years now.
Here’s a metaphor I have been playing around with recently: the overall trend can be in a certain direction, but the individual data points can be all over the place. It’s like a hot air balloon with a hole in the canvas. The hole causes the balloon to drop, but the burner is causing it to rise. So it has forces causing it to rise and fall at the same time. If all your attention is on the burner, looks like all is well. If all your attention is on the hole, look out below.
I think this works for all of the four horsemen you have sketched out. Economic contraction? Yes for most people, but not if you are at the top of the K-shaped economy. Demographic decline? Some places empty out while other places get hyper populated.
Thank you for your the revisited summary and critique of “Long descent”.
I wonder if this long descent will significanctly effect religious groups who already have adopted simple lifestyle e.g. the amish.
Beardtree # 3:
“China is too big of a whale for ready frying and has its own contrary plans for world dominance as explained in the book – The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower”
I bet China would be in a medium term the new global “hyperpower”, but I also guess its hegemony won’t last too much time, due to its own inner problems and contradictions (mainly, its political vs. economical system, but not only this contradiction). Let’s add to the recipe for a long term decline for Chinese elites, the Long Descent, of course (to China western fans dismay).
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Vitranc # 17:
“an official statement of the European commission that the population is getting old, is on the verge of shrinking. And that the only possible solution is to bring in more immigrants in order to keep the economy afloat.”
OK, the EU bureucrats redoubling on the same suicidal-like politics…Nothing new. I think massive migration to the EU is another Ponzi scheme: when birthrates go down to some level of “non return”(and they’re going down globally, even in the poorest countries), there won’t be new migrant workers enough to pay unemployment subsidies and retirement to former workers (native and foreign), so…do the math. They’re blind, or they think “aprés moi, le déluge”.
———————————————————–
JMG # 22:
“Of course once the frackable gas has been extracted and sold, the brief boom is over, and then you have the poisoned groundwater and all the other fun consequences to deal with.”
“Oh, let’s dig more water wells to shower our gardens, as soon as the climate change worsens…Oh wait!”
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Tankermottind # 28:
“The Soviet state did not care if the cars were good;”
You’re right: indeed, he Commies loved trucks and tanks instead of good cars…
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JMG # 46:
“Anon, whether or not naval power has become obsolete is a fascinating question; at the moment, it certainly looks as though it’s off the board for great-power wars, but we’ll see.”
I wouldn’t bet in favor of long term survival of current naval power surface big warships, due to current and near future advances in missiles and drones. However, submarines and fast small ships could do it better, methink. We´ll see…
JMG
I’m not sure anyone could’ve predicted that Donald Trump would not only be president, but also all of the major events that followed up to his second non incumbent election back in 2006. I have a feeling that if Hillary had won in 2016, your predictions would have probably turned out to be more accurate.
Regardless of the details, your predictions have served as a good framework for the last twenty years. I would have been a lot more anxious and confused about all of the changes without your work. Thank you.
“…the American salary class by and large is loyal to its class and not its country…” Oddly enough, that was one of the arguments used against the Jews a century ago. I remember reading Chesterton opinionating that a Jew in the British government was at least as likely to be loyal to his family (scattered throughout the governments of half a dozen European states) as to his country. And now it’s a whole class…
John – I was with you from your early blogs and books on this subject and still believe that you got a whole lot right from the very beginning. Yes, the speed at which we are declining is remarkably slow all things considered. But I am reminded of the quote from Hemingway: “How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” We may be in for some far more severe changes soon, and though these changes may seem sudden to many, anyone who was looking could see them coming from a long way off for a long while. Many of us have relaxed into new normals and a gradual rise of insurmountable predicaments in all areas. What else could one do except pursue change on a personal level? Vote!?! I, like you, came of voting age when it was “Morning in America” and have watched the nation stumble its way along to our current state of “Making America Great Again”, providing the kind of leadership that the vast majority of Americans still demand: growth to infinity and beyond. If it’s not real, then at least make it plausible, or glossy enough for the investment brochure. I find Trump’s push for data centers and AI very reminiscent of the fracking scramble during the Bush/Obama years – not economically viable in the long term but politically expedient in the short term. Which leads us to the only viable economic plan we do have left – deferred maintenance – in health care, education, pension finance/Social Security, energy/resource development, and of course, infrastructure. Our amazing amounts of surplus wealth and productive resources have allowed us a slow decline in every sector. Of course that can only last so long. Still, you never miss the water til the well runs dry… I took your advice years ago and collapsed early to avoid the rush. Well, there’s been no rush to collapse, of course. Not yet, anyway. But what you expected to occur has taken place – a rush to blame and scapegoat – a rush to find someone or some other group to accept less, instead of me or mine – a rush to fraud, corruption and theft – a rush to fantastic solutions or hellish depression – a rush to nasty, mean-spirited political exchanges threatening to explode into violence. In short, a rush to focus on anything other than something useful or helpful. Yes, it appears the human animal is quite predictable when wounded and cornered and I simply remember that it is ‘ever thus’. And so I pray for peace and reflect gratefully on all the blessings I receive daily, and try not to mistake the wounds of the world for the world. Thank you for all your attempts over these many years to help others learn and reflect and change.
Northwind Grandma (no. 27): “like Noah’s whale ate Noah”
ERROR! ERROR!
JMG (no. 46): “He’s right, though, that a breakup of the global chessboard into regional economic and political theaters is inescapable at this point.”
A lot of people say this, but what are the regions? For example, Gail Tverberg foresees a twofold division between the Eastern and Western hemispheres, respectively dominated by the eastern coasts of China and the USA:
https://i0.wp.com/ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Map-showing-world-divided-into-two-areas-of-on-influence.png?ssl=1
“life doesn’t look all that different from what it did 20 years ago—only now with smartphones that suggest something like eternal technological progress.”
The iPhone is 19, it shipped in June of 2007.
As the college scam, this is new;
“Today, Governor Bob Ferguson announced his next major legislative proposal: Requiring all high school seniors to complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid — known as the FAFSA — ”
Why? “In 2024, Washington students left more than $80 million dollars in federal student aid unclaimed.”
That’s money that should be going to WA universities. So the students need to take on crippling debt to bring in a few extra million federal dollars into the system.
https://governor.wa.gov/news/2026/governor-ferguson-announces-new-legislative-proposal-requiring-fafsa-or-wasfa-or-opt-out-graduate
At the same time; “Ferguson warns of ‘dire’ budget outlook, vows not to propose new taxes”
https://komonews.com/news/local/washington-gov-ferguson-calls-budget-situation-dire-but-pledges-no-new-taxes-office-of-financial-management-politics-kd-chapman-projected-revenue-federal-funding-court-mandated
Robert (if I may), interesting. When I was in high school, 1977-1980, we had typing classes, and boys were allowed into them — I took typing to get ready for a writing career. “Keyboarding” was some years off. Odd that it was so much more sudden where you were.
Seaweedy, the fact that they’re nodding their heads is important. Talking about it is the next step.
Roldy, of course we’re not there yet — nor did I say we were. That’s the way we’re heading, though.
Samurai_47, it’s a good metaphor. The great problem is that there are multiple holes, multiple burners, and all kinds of complex feedback loops connecting them!
Zsolt, they’ll have some changes to make but they’ll do a lot better than the rest of us. The less dependent you are on fossil fuels and their many products, the better you’ll fare.
Anon, no, I don’t think Clinton’s election would have put us into the crisis pattern I foresaw in 2006; the rise of unconventional oil was already a done deal at that point. Domestic insurgency moving toward civil war? That’s quite another matter, and I did predict that as a real possibility a little later.
Kfish, you’re welcome and thank you.
Roldy, hmm. Did Chesterton give any evidence for that? I can very easily cite evidence for the lack of patriotism of the current salary class…
Jeff, thanks for this. I hope people who collapsed now did manage to avoid those rushes as well.
Ambrose, that’s not settled yet, and will depend on a great many complex factors that are still in play.
In much lighter news, as in you should only try this stuff at home;
“MOSES LAKE — A man contacted Moses Lake police early Saturday seeking help retrieving illegal drugs he claimed he left at a dealer’s home, according to the Moses Lake Police Department.
Officers responded at about 3 a.m. after the man reported purchasing illegal drugs and then leaving them at the alleged dealer’s residence. When he returned, the person reportedly refused to give him the drugs.”
Well, since I’ve gotten several Emails about ICE agents murdering more people this week I have to say that the bloodshed is already underway.
@40 Bob
This Oligarchy you mention, like other priveleged castes, are in power because they live off the economic surplus generated by the productive in an international society. A successful population reduction plan would undercut the wealth pyramid making their current lifestyles impossible even IF they stayed on top. A population reduction plan would be extremely foolish for them to enact.
But the population will contraxt anyway. Since they got their wealth and influence through birth and not merit, they will lose them (whether they are overthrown in revolts or more likely as money drops out of use in the collapsing economy). Their descendants will fade into obscurity, if they even survive the crises of the Long Descent.
At the time I didn’t expect things like shale oil to be developed at thin or negative net energy return. However when all your built infrastructure requires that form of energy and you can’t afford to replace it then you’ll develop that oil at a loss if needed. And our financial system is well equipped to hide and spread those costs so people won’t notice.
In the end it changes the timing but the end results aren’t much different. It’s still been a useful lesson in the resilience of systems and the efforts that will be taken to preserve them.
JMG, excellent recap of your 20 year old predictions – and congrats on the accuracy. The game of “musical chairs” in the Long Descent in 2026 has the participants armed to the teeth with drones and the cognitive dissonance replaced with “cognitive larceny” of the Elites. It’s quite a show. The current administration seems to be hell bent on making as much profit as possible via crypto, space travel and AI before the Empire falls. Not to mention the continuous path to a neo-fascist economic model where .gov owns corporations that are “too crooked to fail”.
The energy story traveled a path where some fuzzy numbers were exposed – known reserves, new findings and EROI are all areas where a little creative accounting is performed. Greenland, Venezuela and Operation Epic Fury are indicators to the rest of the world the U.S. is attempting a ham-fisted effort to maintain our wealth-pump model and standard of living. I think that will backfire badly. The predicaments of the Long Descent could be addressed more easily with friends, but it appears to me the U.S. is being isolated.
I don’t know where it goes from here, but the natural process of catabolic collapse is racing the tentacles of high tech enslavement – and running neck and neck. I look forward to your posts, though if the global/national control structure remains intact, I would guess the Internet will be toggled off or contain only “approved” content. I’m enjoying it while I can….
@Kfish # 55 – +1
The thing that persuaded me of your initial arguments at ADR is the insanely complicated and fragile links that have to work nearly flawlessly in order for life as we have known it to continue, in any of the categories you listed above. Nothing I have seen since that early post has persuaded me that our material civilization is somehow miraculously more resilient. I am amazed, along with many here, that things have not gotten quite a bit worse than they have (which is already more than bad enough). I look forward to further installments of this series. Thank you.
What aspects of the world do you think the 2006 version of you would find the most surprising?
JMG,
Now that we are in the second quarter of the 2000s, how do you think the Limits to Growth standard run is holding up? It looks to me as if the population graph is in the ballpark, but the predicted drop off in industrial production and food production hasn’t arrived.
Excellent review. Read a lot of comments, many of which are from people who, like myself, were around for the peak oil movement, and readers of your blog since the early archdruid days. Not a whole lot to add. In general, the conclusion I draw from your evaluation of your earlier prediction is that the disconnect of most people from the real processes of producing the goods needed to survive has given the elites the ability to kick the ball down the road farther, and dodge crisis a little longer, which will make it uglier when it comes, before a new stability emerges. It occurs to me that the current wars are speeding up that process, because the elites running them have lost all perspective on the limits of their power.
I was one who hoped that the turmoil in the Republican party which led to Trump might, in fact, be that recalibration we needed, but his campaign proved to be one of the greatest frauds in American political history, which is saying a lot, and the corruption playing out to his, and his cronies, piling up that “hallucinatory wealth” just confirms to me the extent of the delusion of our elites. Nothing they can do would surprise me now, not even nuclear weapons.
I will state that both #2 – economic contraction … AND #3 – a collapsing public health sector are related to the after-effects of the mRNA VAXXINE$. Tis now obvious that 2/3rds to 3/4s of the entire global population is seeing a reduction in viable pregnancies, no doubt brought about due to the deleterious effects of the artificially enhanced genetic garbage pushed onto the public(s) at large! That, in addition to the ever increasing suction of asset grift by the digital oligarchic class of our modern day version of vicious morlocks, will be our undoing.
It occurred to me at work while I was working in manifest that the data centers being built all over the place are probably being used for those block chains used in crypto currencies.
Hi John Michael,
Ha! It happens, yeah. And the world can be a far stranger place than we anticipated. Tell you what, I predicted that there’d be petrol rationing after Easter due to the dust up in the middle east, but instead strategic reserves were drained. That’s strategy for you! 😉 Agreed, those seeking change may not like the outcome.
For your interest, I put together a graph on the realities of solar power production for three weeks on either side of the winter solstice, at this location. Solar power statistics around the winter solstice
A few months ago I purchased eight second hand 190W solar panels off a guy in a country town an hours drive up north, and we met up ironically at a petrol station to swap the cash for the high tech items. $300 for the lot, and it is worth mentioning that the very first large panel cost $750 each 17 years ago. Few people know what to do with these scrapped items, but putting them to use is a good option.
In the 70’s people used to say: re-use; repair; and only then recycle. It’s funny to me how that has been flipped on its head. You’d imagine that outcome was deliberate, don’t you reckon?
Anyway, using up plenty of scrap materials I already had, plus another four second hand panels, I chucked those dozen up on a roof. So a the new (old) panels were added, which brings the total to 48 all up. You’d think it’d be enough, but no, the sun produces what it does when it’s low in the sky, and that’s how the hippy tech works. On a bright note I brought the annual little generator battery charger combo usage from 11 days last year (and 21 days from memory the year before) down to 5 days. Not bad, but clearly there are diminishing returns with this stuff, and it doesn’t snow here these days. Good luck with solar if that happens in your part of the world! At least people will get some exercise scraping the snow off the glass.
Dude, the joke of it all is that in our civilisation electricity is only around 15% to 18% of all the energy used, the rest is clearly stuff fed to the hungry flames. Hmm. And I’ve done my very best with this tech. It’s good, but not good enough to run a civilisation upon. Oh well, it is a fun (but financially ruinous) hobby for me. 🙂 Thank the gods for firewood, huh!
Cheers
Chris
One thing I believe you’ve mentioned is that during a descent, obviously there’ll be boondoggles wasting resources like fusion power, AI and so on – but there’ll also be elite distractions. I think it was John Ralston Saul who commented that French courtly etiquette and fashion reached their peak just before the French Revolution. So I saw the below and thought of exactly that.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/15/us-military-testosterone-screening-hegseth
The US diplomatically defeated by Iran, and he’s worried about… testosterone levels.
I think the decline is managed a lot more than some people would care to admit. Focusing on national politics is probably a waste of energy since both sides are marching us towards a surveillance state. It seems like the top of the pyramid is trying to get us to murder each other over throwaway social issues so that they can use the chaos as cover while they loot the treasury. My guess is the reason you are writing this now is that you can also see rats swimming away from the ship.
“Sorry, ma’am, the soonest we can get you an appointment is November of 2027.”
I don’t know if you realize how accurate this is. There’s a service I refer people to that regularly sends me back messages:
“Thanks for your referral on Patient XYZ. Please note there is a 3 year wait time. We expect this patient to be seen by July 2029.”
I’m really not kidding.
My husband and I are beginning to look at the changes we’ll need to start making ahead of the 20% drop in our Social Security payments when the system has to switch to paying from current income. I look forward to learning everything I can from this series so that we can weather the changes that occur during the 20 years more or less that we can reasonably anticipate we have left, given our parents’ ages at death and their health history. Although each of us is healthier now than our parents were at our ages, we won’t have access to some of the medical interventions that they did as the medical industry continues its crapification and we get priced out of Medigap/Medicare (if they don’t die before we do). Not that we want those interventions, mind you; we were just discussing this with good friends earlier today.
How do you factor in the baby bust? Elites are already raising alarms. Too many people was bad enough, but too few – especially too few young workers – is a huge problem to growth-centered economics.
I prefer the term ‘power’ to ‘energy’. Power = energy/time. What is usually called ‘renewable energy’ I prefer to call ‘owned power’, and the other sort I call ‘rented power’.
JMG and Robert,
Perhaps allowing boys in to typing was a Pacific NW thing. I went to high school in the same time frame as John, but in Oregon. Boys were allowed to take typing even though it was mostly girls. My mother made me take typing because she had met my father when he was still in college and ended up typing all of his papers and she wanted me to be able to do it myself.
When I went to college you had to type most of your official papers ( this is before computers were used for such things). Most of my fellow male students ( especially the ones from fancy NE prep schools) did not have typing skills and would be sitting around the student lounge hunting and pecking out a paper with two fingers.
I am not sure why this disconnect ,where college bound men were not encouraged to learn to type in high school but when they arrived in college they were expected to type. Perhaps this was a good example, at the time, of delusional thinking. Elite students at Exeter could not be bothered to learn the pedestrian skill of typing but would magically be able to type once they entered Princeton or some other such place.
Hi John,
Having followed you for 20 years, I think you did a remarkably good job. The biggest mistake I can remember is when you suggested global warming would flood the Florida coast, approximately where I live, well before now. I honestly haven’t seen an inch of rising sea here — I have a wall on the inland water way here and I have been watching for any indication of any rise whatsoever. Indeed the whole “global warming” argument appears to be a suspect. I’m not saying there SHOULDN’T be global warming; I’m not saying humans haven’t messed up the eco-system (the loss of insect species is self evident). But little evidence of any sea-rise (and somehow Obama, a true climate alarmist, must have known that wasn’t likely when he got his coastal home).
Here is a question for you: What would it take for you to reconsider the inevitability of industrial collapse?
1.0 Could LLM’s — a real black swan — change the outcome?
2.0 Could a fusion breakthrough change the outcome?
Nobody has been more surprised than I at how rapidly and profoundly LLMs have removed many limitations on the possible. I know LLMs are not intelligent, but they are quite profound in their impact already.
ESPECIALLY the very small LLMs which will fit on a 16 Gbyte Mac Mini or in a Tesla. If you haven’t been studying a foreign language, nor programming, over the past few years, you might not know. If you haven’t been full-self driven by a Tesla, you are past due for a revelation.
LLM’s are not intelligent, and I hope they never become so. But they have ALREADY introduced decades, if not centuries, of improvement in efficiency and jumps in knowledge and capability, in many domains — including language learning, math, physics, chemistry, robotics, etc.. And the small ones, at least, don’t take very much energy, and can, in fact, be completely powered with simple rooftop solar on a modest scale.
Please understand I am not saying a collapse of industrial civilization isn’t already underway. And I am not saying it isn’t still likely. I’m just asking what “breakthroughs” — probably enabled by LLMs — MIGHT change the equation? I’m guessing you would expect fusion to do it — IF a fusion breakthrough suddenly occurred? If anything might change the fusion odds, I would expect LLMs to do that.
PS. I am aware there is a verboten term and I am not using it. I hope that makes this question admissible, It is certainly relevant to today’s essay.
Siliconguy, yeah, that sounds like Moses Hole. In a certain quirky sense, I’m almost glad that so little has changed in at least one part of Washington state.
Moonwolf8, law enforcement officers at all levels routinely kill people, and in a fair number of cases — such as several of those the Democrats are flogging via social media just now — it’s a matter of suicide by cop. (Pro tip: trying to use your vehicle to run down a uniformed officer who’s packing heat is rarely a smart move.) What I’m talking about is something on a considerably bigger and less routine scale. Call me when the death toll from single incidents breaks into three figures.
Twilight, that’s exactly what I missed, of course. The overall change is the same, but the route and the timing are different — and of course those matter.
Drhooves, I see the technological triumphalism as a matter of desperate Hail Mary moves rather than just an attempt to profit; it seems likely to me that the kleptocrats that are backing the current administration know what the score is, and are pouring money into extreme long shots in the hope that one of them might come off. As for cryptocurrency, that’s yet another gimmick to paper over the contraction of real wealth by floating one speculative bubble after another. Other than that, yeah, that seems about right.
Clarke, oh, the current state of affairs is resilient, all right. It’s bending rather than breaking…but the pressure is still forcing it in the same direction.
Gunstone, I’ve already discussed that in the post.
Samurai_47, we’re approaching crunch time for the “standard run” model. If the industrial production and food production lines don’t begin to sink within a decade or so, that run probably has to be junked, or at least modified considerably. Mind you, it’s quite possible that those curves could start to sink in the years immediately ahead, but we’ll see.
Jerry, I’m not at all surprised that Trump didn’t live up to your expectations; a lot of people projected hopes onto him that, all things considered, a reality TV star and real estate promoter with no political experience was never likely to fulfill. It’s crucial to see his career as a symptom, and one that reliably shows up at this stage along the curve of decline.
Polecat, that’s one factor among many, but it’s significant.
Moonwolf8, doubtless that’s one of the things in mind, but there’s much more involved than that.
Chris, may I please take that comment about electricity and have a blacksmith put it on the business end of a branding iron, so that I can brutally burn it into the backsides of all those who think that grid power is the be-all and end-all of our energy predicament? Thank you.
Warburton, a valid point! I see privately funded spacecraft as the current equivalent of those courtiers playing shepherds and shepherdesses with Marie Antoinette — granted, they’re playing Tom Corbett, Space Cadet instead, but it amounts to the same thing.
KVD, no, I’m writing this now because I expect energy availability to become a serious issue again during the next decade or so, and getting information to people who can use it in their own lives strikes me as a very good idea. We’re the rats, and the sooner we get moving off the sinking ship of high-energy lifestyles, the better.
Bofur, yes, I’m entirely aware of that. I have friends in Britain who’ve talked to me about the appalling delays in getting access to the medical system there.
SLClaire, sensible of you. I’ve drawn up similar plans, though I’m not on Social Security yet.
Paradoctor, I’ve been talking about depopulation since 2006. I’ll be reviewing that in an upcoming post. In the meantime, you might find this post interesting.
Gnat, a working commercial fusion power plant producing plenty of electricity reliably at significantly lower cost than fission power would make me reconsider things. Technical feasibility isn’t the issue, as I have to repeat over and over again — energy sources have to be economically viable to matter. As for LLMs, I’ve ridden in a self-driving car several times now, and I’m aware of several other feats that the technology has accomplished. So far, in terms of the broader picture, it’s a pig in a poke. Insisting that LLMs must somehow be able to extract world-saving technological breakthroughs is pure handwavium; they might equally well be very, very effective at explaining to us just how thoroughly we’re screwed. To matter, any such solution (or set of solutions) has to be readily deployable, economically viable, and generate fewer problems than it solves, or it’s yet another pond scum Ponzi scheme of the sort we’ve seen so drearily often.
One sign of the decline: https://blog.playstation.com/2026/07/01/physical-disc-production-ending-in-january-2028-for-new-games-releasing-on-playstation-consoles/
This, predictably, has caused a huge backlash. Sony cited a massive decline in physical copies and is pointing to the fact that 85% of games are being sold (or subscribed to) via online distribution channels. They are (perhaps rightly so) being accused of the usual greedy capitalist villain tropes.
One thing I haven’t seen anyone talking about is the fact that outside of video game consoles, almost nobody at the consumer-level uses optical discs anymore. Now, physically speaking, Blu-rays are just a piece of foil sandwiched between two pieces of plastic, not much more complicated than vinyl records which are single pieces of pressed plastic. Once you have the tooling, making new copies are ridiculously trivial and cheap.
The key is the tooling: the grooves in a vinyl record are something you can feel with your fingers and see with your eyes unaided. The pits etched on the Blu-ray’s reflective layer, not so much. Key to the announcement is that this applies only to releases starting January 2028, and to quote the initial announcement “This transition has no impact on games that already released, or will be releasing, prior to January 2028 in disc format.”
It’s clear that they are planning to continue selling and perhaps producing already-released titles in some limited quantity. What this tells me is that the disc production plants are coming up to Sony, saying, hey guys, once your contract is up it will now cost $X to create new masters to produce new discs. And I’m sure Sony can afford it, but they’re probably selling less than a tenth of what they used to and decided that they’d rather not maintain that sales channel.
Optical discs, for sure, aren’t going away soon. A lot of niche industrial applications still rely on them, but in those cases the market will be filled by blank recordable media. If you just need a handful of copies, it doesn’t matter that it takes you five minutes to burn a disc instead of, I dunno, two seconds to press out ten copies.
Aside from gamers, I think there are still a few cinephiles holding out on blu-rays. But due to the technology required to make them, I don’t think they’ll make the kind of comeback that vinyl did in the past years.
Steve T #12: Thanks for the stroll down memory lane. It is hard to believe appliances used to last decades, medical doctors could heal, school actually made economic sense, and I didn’t regard registered Democrats and Republicans to be mentally unfit to vote.
John, Thank you for the response. As you said, and I agree, ” Insisting that LLMs must somehow be able to extract world-saving technological breakthroughs is pure handwavium; they might equally well be very, very effective at explaining to us just how thoroughly we’re screwed.”
They are truely a double edged sword, I have no doubt about that any more. If nothing else, as I’ve previously observed here, since LLMs obviously aren’t conscious we have to conclude that far too many humans don’t qualify as conscious, either. I use the word “agency” a lot now. If a human can’t demonstrate agency even as effectively as an LLM, why does one have “rights” or “a soul” and the other one not?
JMG, that’s what dawned on me, the possibility you might mean the latter. I guess they call it busyness for a reason. Maybe God and the gods have decided humans need a break from the pig troughs for awhile and put out to forage for a bit. Just to keep the herd honest and healthy. It makes sense to me. In that case business would be a matter of earning a living at beat, not making a killing, as Adolf the old Bohemian chef in Hot Springs used to say to my dad. He was a luxury liner chef then started his own restaurant. I’ve noticed a lot of the old craftsmen were like that: they took pride in their work and had reasonable fees.
@Clay Dennis (#78):
it was a matter of time ,more than of place, I think. My high-school years were 20 years earlier than yours and JMG’s, at the end of the 1950s. And Berkeley (where I went to high school) was one of the more conservative towns in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1940s and 1950s; it even had mandatory basic military drill every week for elementary-school boys. “A heavily policed (pseudo-)utopia” wouldn’t be too far off the mark. (The town flipped hard from conservative to liberal during the 1960s. I was there. I saw it happen, and I saw how surprised and horrified almost all older Berkeley residents were at the time.)
I never checked, but it seems quite likely to me that high-school boys in Berkeley were allowed to take typing in the 1970s, twenty years after my time.
That is the problems with predictions, they rarely turn up when you expect. I consider them more like prophecies, don’t focus on the specific dates but more the general shape of the trends.
@JMG & Gunstone RE : “Nuclear weapons are old technology.”
Thank you! Something that many haven’t realised is that economics of scale has made smaller more focused weapons much cheaper. The biggest innovation of the last decade would be Drone based warfare. You can fly in a powerful explosive complete with video feed using an off the shelf Xbox controller for less than a few thousand dollars. That is why Ukraine has managed to deal more damage than expected. Now Ukraine is like a house cat biting an elephant instead of a mosquito.
@Vitranc RE : Population decline.
Having a line like that at a graduation ceremony reads like a cheap D-grade sci-fi book/movie. The editor would say “To on the nose.”
We are going to move into a post-growth/degrowth world. Either we do it by choice or by force, I suspect it will mostly be by force. But if you can employ proactive degrowth ideas in a world that is reactive, you can at least get ahead of it. Collapse now and… well, you know the rest. 😉
@Silicon guy : Encrapification of the food supply.
I used to work at a food manufacturer. We put out a tender to Aldi for some pre-packed lasagne. We provided three samples, the idea being the top end was really nice but too pricey but to set the standard for taste. The low end that was cheap and nasty but so awful that they wouldn’t want it, and the mid range that was actually pretty good but with a few changes to the top range.
They didn’t even taste them, they took a look at the prices and went for the bottom end. Took them less than 15 seconds to make that decision. This is the way these places are being run now. Quality be damned, it just needs to cheap.
@ Pygmycory “Really, I think your predictions did as well as anyone’s, and a lot better than most.”
As a whole they are pretty good predictions. Contrary, I think the awards for poor predictions would go to Guy McPherson and Jeremy Rifkin.
McPherson predicted the end of mankind for 2020.
Riffkin predicted that we would have a $100 trillion market crash because all fossil fuel infrastructure would be obsolete by electric things and renewable doodads. He also predicted the end of work by the year 2000 due to AI. So yeah, JMG has done ok.
@ Sama RE : Herbalism
One thing that takes a long while for folks to learn about Herblism, it isn’t just about the plants. It is to be a carer first, to understand their wants and needs and then the herbs are the next stage. I have found that a large part of it is also to be preventative or delay the decline. The big issues I see with some herbalists is a combination of naivety and excessive optimism. Folks that over promise on results.
This is not medical advice but just examples.
Some rashes can use chamomile or aloe vera. Nausea? then try ginger, better yet even dried ginger in an meal or elixir due to the added trerpenes and lipids that come with that. Light to mild anxiety, lemon balm tea or Ashwaganda. Stage 4 melanoma… probably not much that can be done beyond treatment of side effects. One has to know the limits of what can be done.
Also don’t bear yourself up for now knowing it all. Some herbalists I know have been doing it for over 50 years and they are still learning.
@ 5Flycatcher RE : Consequences.
There are some decent books by William T Volleman called ‘Carbon Ideologies’. Book one ‘No immediate danger’ is about how Nuclear isn’t as great as the proponents make it out and that we should always assume that corporations will take shortcuts of safety. Book two ‘No good alternative’ is about how renewables are not that great and that coal may have a life time far beyond what many anticipate.
But the best thing about those books is that the author decided to write them to an audience a few hundred years in the future. It is basically an explanation to them on why we did what we did, why their world is much hotter and less abundant and that we are not selfish demons. We where just trying to take it day by day. It is great framing of the future. People and societies persist but they are facing the blow back of dumping 2 trillion tons+ of CO2 into the air.
@ Forecasting Re : “I don’t think 2030 is the end of the world, rather a step change in the process of decline.”
Personally I don’t like to put a ‘this year is when X happens’. But I do suspect that the 2030’s is when the pace of the slope will become a lot more apparent to many people. You can see the beginnings of this in the way people are starting to vote but that is a trailing indicator of the larger picture.
Gnat,
LLMs are incapable of producing true breakthroughs. To the extent that they seem to solve previous unsolved mathematical problems or even produce profound philosophical insights, by the way they are designed, it has to be because you surfaced something in its training data that was already there, written by a human being that history either forgot or never noticed. Often, it’s a collection of human beings and the LLM assembles their work together in a way that creates a mathematical proof.
@ Drhoves and JMG “I see the technological triumphalism as a matter of desperate Hail Mary moves rather than just an attempt to profit; it seems likely to me that the kleptocrats that are backing the current administration know what the score is, and are pouring money into extreme long shots in the hope that one of them might come off.”
It is one of those funny parallels at the moment. China is trying to do the same thing, particularly in the field of robotics. They can see the trends of the future and are desperately trying to engineer their way out of the problem.
But I have said it for a while, take any news story about China in terms of economics or technology, replace the word ‘China’ with ‘Japan’ and you would have the exact same news stories from the 1980’s. Look at how it worked out for them. Their attempts at technological dominance to overcome limits hasn’t worked out. For all the talk of Robot manufacturing and caring for the elderly, it has largely been a failure.
@JMG
>”there’s definitely a major game of chicken being played with strategic oil reserves. ”
A game of chicken against who?
China has 1.4 billion, more than 4 times the current US SPR levels, and China has a lot also in commercial reserves.
Europe. Europe seems to be the only one that is in deep kimchi with reserves now.
The third world doesn’t really uses that much energy, but what they use is essential, and here US might lose allies, and third world coul weather it out by getting close to Russia/Iran, etc, India is also in a great risk, but this might be the moment where the West loses India.
South America could be in deep trouble. How will US benefit from this chaos? I think US thinks they will be isolated. Where will all those migrants try to go?
@Siliconguy
Back on Energy, supposedly the US still has 80-odd years of natural gas reserves left. At what price is a fair question though. The AI boondoggle may shorten that a bit. Fracking is more effective at gas extraction than it is at oil, it’s a simple matter of viscosity.
A lot of gas is a sign also that the well peaked and will be going in double digits decline, fracking wells have their quirks
@JMG; Well yes, but still your dashing younger self had more restraint then, well most. I am just reflecting on the attitudes and you provide a good mirror just now. And as usual it is a strange one, because I am not looking at a fool who turned wise, but at someone who refined his opinions.
On another reflective thought, I do see a bit more cynicism and melancholy. I think we got used to the disappointments. As you said “It may still turn into another missed opportunity, but we’ll see. ”
Two decades of disappointment will do that to ones perception.
@Chuaquin; Oh granted, it is. But it always was. Even when Merkel welcomed the wave in 2015, or when they made bilateral agreements in the 80s to get the Yugoslavs and the Turkish workers. It always was a Ponzi scheme. Keeping the ball rolling no matter the cost.
What I am getting at is that there is open admission, that the system cannot hold, that this is a patch, and it will come down. Imagine running the modern European political system on the admission, that all those social and retirement taxes you pay will do you no good. There will be no pension. I wonder how the betrayed 50 and 40 year olds will react. And the featureless 20 year olds- The reaction in the comment sections was a show of disillusionment.
Like above with John, I wonder whee this will go. But a loss of legitimacy might well be nearer then we would like to admit. Or there is still enough of a societal lair that profits so much from the status quo, that they will cynically keep going. It is not like “aprés moi, le déluge” would be the motto of a lot of modern European 60+ population.
@gnat
LLMs are deeply flawed, here’s some problems:
– hallucinations;
– context rot;
– expensive;
– amnesia across sessions;
– stuck in version, unable to learn post training;
– 4 years in and corporations and LLMs themselves didn’t find anything they are good at to make a profit;
etc
If you are fine that the great future LLMs are painting is a hallucination, well, I cannot say anything,
but we are 4 years in with LLMs if you don’t know these things about LLMs, and you still find LLMs great you don’t know anything about LLMs
4 years, think about it, compare that with fracking 4 years into fracking and at least we had something and with way less investments
Mr. Greer, thank you for another fascinating post. I can’t help but be reminded of Richard Heinberg’s 2011 book The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality. In that book, Heinberg warned that Peak Oil (officially reached in 2005) meant that the economy would never grow again, except on paper. Of course, the economy today seems, on paper, to be nominally more valuable than at any other point, since we can finally “boast” the first trillionaire in history, but that is only because money has become completely disconnected from anything except itself. Meanwhile, people making over a hundred thousand a year openly wonder why there are living more poorly now than they did as college students living on minimum wage in the 2000s. It never occurs to them that the money lost its value primarily because the energy that made everyone so much richer back than has also fallen into irreversible decline. I can already see the news headlines some years from now, in which people with million-dollar per year salaries still struggle to stay clothed, fed, and housed, because no increase in the amount of paper money wealth can make up for the loss of the only thing that made real economic growth possible.
JMG et al
It seems that almost as soon as I could think I realized on some level that you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet and that we weren’t headed to space en masse.. I don’t know why that seemed intuitive when various other social messages didn’t. I was working for an environmental organization in London when the 1973 oil crisis hit. The concept of peak oil seemed so obvious. Right conclusion, 50 years off on the timing I guess. It seemed for awhile then that we might opt for a more sustainable path. Almost by the end of the year I realized that it wasn’t going to happen.
By 1980 and the start of the Thatcher/Reagan era and the North Sea and North Slope and deep sea there seemed no doubt that we were locked into the path we were on. Of course there was then the absurd 80s prosperity consciousness:all you have to do is want wealth badly enough and you will get it.
I must confess that in the early 2000s with your early work and that of Mike Rupert, Matthew Simmons and others and the invasion of Iraq for oil, I thought the decline slope would move faster than it has. It does seem that now with the closure of Hormuz, etc there is again more interest in peak oil, at least on the logistic level, though some of that concern seems to be sleeping over to the geological level as well. We shall see.
Stephen
JMG
Unless I misunderstood you, I believe you said that you thought actual living conditions were worse for many now than during the great depression.. I would disagree with that. I was born right at the end of the depression and raised by people who had lived through it. Of course then as now some people with jobs or assets did much better than others, but there was more widespread abject poverty than there is now yet, though I think this will end up worse than that before it finishes. I think too that people throughout the western world now have more unrealistic expectations of endless plenty than they did then.
I always remember something Dimitri Orlov said concerning the Soviet decline ,which would probably also be true of the depression,as opposed to the coming American one: that it was like falling out of the ground story window,as opposed to falling out of the penthouse
Stephen
One problem with trying to assess economic viability is that financial viability can be something else again. Many things which may not be economically viable have been made financially viable in the short term by financial instruments (which have become more sophisticated, i.e. opaque) that shift the costs into the future (and often onto others through index funds and the like). This currently works on the basis that many people are willing to bet on the future being better than the present in terms of technology etc., and of course many still believe that the stock market *always* rises over the *long-term* (JM Keyne’s remark that “in the long-run we are all dead” is quite apposite here). When those expectations change for a large enough portion of society, things will get interesting. Personally, I think this is most likely to be twenty years away when most of the Boomer generation is gone. In this context, it is interesting that some governments are increasingly trying to mandate locked away contributions into retirement funds – which essentially looks to me like taxation by another name, as the likelihood that these contributions will be lost in large part by collapsing markets, etc. seems to be increasing.
One rapid change I have over the year or so is the frequent sight of young men traveling around town on electric scooters. I live in a Central Valley California town that is flat with not much rain and no snow or ice, so scooters work the vast majority of the days weatherwise. Coats on colder days and the breeze created by moving along cooling on the hot days. Back in the day those same young men would have had a car, usually a used one picked up for a reasonable price and scootering would be beneath them. I often tell them, “Hey, man, you’re driving the car of the future!”
Robert M. # 47:
“Did the men call what they did on those keyboards “typing?” No, of course not! What the males did was universally called “keyboarding,” never “typing,”
Difference between using a typewriter and a computer keyboard has made me to remember maybe I was in the last generation who saw and used to some extent old school typewriters. During the ’80s, my father had a typewriter, so I learned to type in that machine, before starting to use my first PC (1985), where of course, I “keyboarded”. The ’80s were a technological boundary time, methink.
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JMG # 60:
“When I was in high school, 1977-1980, we had typing classes, and boys were allowed into them — I took typing to get ready for a writing career.”
I never had typing classes during my high school time (first ’90s: typing was outdated in those times), but I remember there was some typing classes in private academies in my old town, until the first ’80s. I leared by myself at home to type, then with my first computer I found the PC keys “too soft” during my first times with my PC.
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KVD # 74:
“It seems like the top of the pyramid is trying to get us to murder each other over throwaway social issues so that they can use the chaos as cover while they loot the treasury.”
I tend to suspect the same dirty trick is tried by our reckless elites here to avoid facing real problems, in my country and in the whole EU…It’s an ominous fact that last witnesses of last Spanish Civil War are dead today, so nobody can tell you directly how awful was that war. However, I also think “political hooligans” are a minority nowadays, most people here seems center left or right, but some historians also say in 1936 a lot of Spaniards were depolitized: that fact didn’t prevent the war…
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gnat # 79:
“I’m not saying humans haven’t messed up the eco-system (the loss of insect species is self evident). But little evidence of any sea-rise (and somehow Obama, a true climate alarmist, must have known that wasn’t likely when he got his coastal home).”
Well, maybe it depends of long time tendences, or it’s more evident in some areas than another ones. It’s interesting to point some beaches in the Mediterranean coasts here, have been losing more and more fast their sand, apparently due to harder streams and “non usual” storms (?). Official truth is sea has risen only a few millimeters during current century. Is it true? What I’ve seen in TV news during last decades is heavy machines and workers have been more busy loading new sand over our most touristic beaches to fill the “holes”. It’s a bit suspicious…
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JMG # 80:
“Insisting that LLMs must somehow be able to extract world-saving technological breakthroughs is pure handwavium; they might equally well be very, very effective at explaining to us just how thoroughly we’re screwed”
I agree. You’re right in the handwavium thing. In addition to this, current “AI” frenzy cannot hide very well that all those data centers which are planned to be built will use a lot of electric power and water to work. Here our “smart” politicians are in the LLM-data centers business too (it doesn’t matter their party). Well, they ‘ll need a lot of power. Oh, and tons of freshwater for refrigeration, in a near future context of climate change. Droughts in Spain have become more common and harder during current century. What could be wrong?
Mr. Greer, et all – Off topic, but the other day, I picked up a new documentary, from my local library. “Feels Good Man,” about Pepe the Frog, his rise, memes, and what it all means. I remembered that you had a post or two, on the phenomenon. Much to my surprise and delight, there you were! Four or five times, discussing meme magic and, perhaps, counter measures. Of the many people who appeared in the film, you struck me as one of the most thoughtful, and erudite. And, maybe, not quit so “fringe,” after all. Lew
@Chris #72. Thank you for that power chart, very cool. Actually gives me some hope.
My home currently uses just under 3KWh per day, yes even in winter. So to see a system like yours could potentially be viable years down the road. Honestly, the thing I would miss the most without electricity is the freezer. Everything else is fairly optional. And even if I had to give up the freezer, there are alternative storage options.
The long term goal is 1KWh a day but that is going to be a fair stretch. That would probably be the freezer a few lights and a low powered laptop.
@Sama Lindera
You are right about lack of data about what happens in reality.
Al these days reminded me about this documentary by Adam Curtis
https://thoughtmaybe.com/hypernormalisation/
I am writing a book at the moment, in Romanian I have a chapter about this.
When I searched about this it seems that there is a paper that looks into this:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6125386
“I argue that Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) constitutes the discipline’s Glasnost moment. By automating the generation of methodologically fluent, theoretically compliant text at near-zero marginal cost, GenAI precipitates the collapse of the proof-of-work signalling economy not by attacking its institutions, but by exposing their performative nature. It renders the underlying logic visible, stripping the journal article of its value as a proxy for cognitive labour. Instead of offering renewal, this transparency forces a structural reweighting of epistemic authority: away from the mechanical production of form (Episteme), now inexpensive and abundant, toward judgment grounded in direct contact with reality (Phronesis) and exposure to consequence—a signal that cannot be sustained without the friction of the world. ”
This bit: “a signal that cannot be sustained without the friction of the world. ” is the best description of the shortcomings of AI…
Ok – so the 80% or so of poorer people who are ruled BY any given political system are not the same as the political system, and *importantly* will probably rarely share the interests of said political system, especially since it is in the interest of every political system to *rule* over people whose interests lie in not being ruled. I think I get that.
I’ve been chewing a bit on this passage: “consider the British aristocracy of the Victorian era, who certainly put their class interests front and center but were also by and large pretty jingoistic in their defense of Britain and its imperial claims. That’s the thing that’s emphatically not true of US and European managerial elites. They lack any patriotic sense at all, and would be just as happy if their countries were to be conquered by somebody else so long as they got to keep or improve their current status. That’s an unusual state for an elite class to be in.”
And it strikes me that the “imperial claims” which the British aristocracy of the Victorian era were jingoistic in defense required that their conquests be successful. And for their conquests to be successful required the discovery and cultivation of a local elite willing to “manage” the 80%’s of India, and Africa, and China, and Persia, and all of the other “British imperial conquests” upon which the sun never set.
Which is to say that being “patriotic” about one’s capacity to conquer others requires that those others contain elite classes willing to be “unpatriotically” conquered, so long as they can keep their own status, as they turn to the “management” of their compatriots for the benefit of the conquerors, who will be busy stealing whatever is not nailed down. These two elite orientations (conquest vs management) appear to feed one another… to the detriment of ordinary people everywhere, really.
JMG – US ‘healthcare’ is remarkable. Your country appears to spend twice as much (percent of GDP) as the UK. It spends nearly 2.5x as much as Italy. Yet, if we believe published statistics, average lifespan in the UK is around three years longer and in Italy it’s five years longer than in the USA.
Despite being full of private/for-profit hospitals and doctors’ offices, and most patients making an insurance claim to pay any medical bill, the US government appears to spend as much on healthcare as the UK government. This is due to the government having to a) pay most of the medical bills incurred by over-65s and b) pay the medical bills of working-age adults who are destitute. Some of these people are just extremely poor, others went bankrupt after a previous medical bill.
I gleaned the above from online sources. I apologise if there are significant mistakes. But US healthcare is a truly staggering achievement [sarc.]
So will the loss of ‘healthcare’ really be a loss? Maybe if we can keep trauma surgery, and get rid of nearly all the rest, we’ll be fine. Read for a start most of the books by Dr Malcolm Kendrick, who’s shown for 15 years how most official drug trials are fraudulent. See also the blog ‘Lies are Unbekoming’ and that of ‘The Midwestern Doctor’.
This review of your predictions is a blast from the past. I remember reading it and hoping this meant that people were going to be sensible (more fool me) and start to build sensible public transportation and not sacrifice valuable real estate for cars and high ways.
Alas my sister taught me a truth. That people would rather slit their own throats then give up their convenience. People will give up their single family houses, massive cars, and car dependent suburbs over their dead bodies. Greed and selfishness makes people stupid. I do not say that lightly, i say that with a level of disappointment born out by 70 years of bad policy.
@JMG:
“I have friends in Britain who’ve talked to me about the appalling delays in getting access to the medical system there.”
I think what’s interesting as a follow-on to this is the element of normalcy bias and hope that most people have.
What I mean is: when you say “there’s a three-year wait time to see the XYZ service”, many people will think to themselves, “Oh well, that’s insane, but they must be working on it. Surely they’re working on it, and this is just a blip.”
Hardly anyone thinks, “this is as good as it’s ever going to be.”
And that’s how slow decline works. One day twenty years goes by and you realize, gosh darnit, it never did get better, did it.
Also, ONLY because you said it first:
“LLMs might equally well be very, very effective at explaining to us just how thoroughly we’re screwed.”
They ARE, that’s exactly what I’ve been saying! All of the mainstream ones will ALREADY be honest about this if you ask (I have tried it).
“Paradoctor, I’ve been talking about depopulation since 2006. I’ll be reviewing that in an upcoming post. In the meantime, you might find this post interesting.”
For when that post comes, I thought you might appreciate these articles on the utter futility of pro-natalist measures.
https://npg.org/library/forum-series/embracing-the-birth-dearth-the-futility-of-pro-natalism/
https://npg.org/library/forum-series/embracing-the-birth-dearth-part-2-the-right-stuff/
And also this brilliant article on the myth of growth-driven prosperity:
https://npg.org/library/forum-series/the-myth-of-growth-driven-prosperity/
The analogy between net energy and profit isn’t just an analogy — it’s the same structural relationship. The industrial infrastructure is the operating cost of civilization, and as net energy declines, those operating costs consume an ever-larger share of the gross, leaving less surplus for the organisms embedded in the system. This is why the most complex, highest-throughput economies see the steepest quality-of-life decline even while GDP nominally rises: industrial civilization’s metabolic demands are inelastic, but the surplus available to human beings is not.
Sama#24
Movies about the Great Depression:
The Grapes of Wrath
The Southerner
John Doe
They don’t shoot the horses ?
King Fish
Oh Brother
A curious outcome of how the poverty moved people to look for an evasión:
Ben-Hur , Snow-White, the Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind.
An architectonic proof of faith in the economic recovery:
The Empire State Building.
No One Is Coming to Save US:
https://becomingnoble.substack.com/p/young-adults-are-poor-despite-every
“I think that Millennials and Zoomers are not doing fine. In fact, I think there have been structural changes to our economy and society which clearly explain why these cohorts are failing to move through the five pillars of a stable middle-class existence: education, stable employment, marriage, homeownership, children.”
Heard.
It’s become difficult to see our (boomer) parents going on big trips and buying crap they don’t need, holding on to wealth without sharing, and their grandkids struggling to get a house. I know that “boomers” aren’t some big monolith, but there are some aspects of them holding on to wealth that ring true to my own experience.
Same with Mitch McConnel still in office and Lindsey Graham… Lindsey Graham was sworn on January 3, 2003, succeeding Strom Thurmond. Thurmond took that seat on November 7, 1956. That’s only two Senators in nearly 70 years.
That’s why I am promoting the No Incumbents movement.
https://imgur.com/a/SiAFEtI
It’s also why I support Metamucil Neurofiber:
https://imgur.com/a/MIf1xj6
I think that one thing that nobody twenty years ago could have predicted would have been the “AI” craze, and what we can already see of the chaos it will produce in failing. This isn’t primarily a question of technology ( since developments over the last twenty years in IT have been more evolutionary than fundamental, compared to the ten years before 2006, let alone the ten years before that) but it’s essentially political and psychological. Thus we have a technology with three characteristics (1) for the most part it doesn’t actually exist in useful form yet: the real benefits are almost always carefully placed in the future (2) to exist even in principle, it will require unbelievable amounts of annual investment, the construction of infrastructure beyond anything recently known and unbelievable consumption of energy that in many cases doesn’t exist and never will and (3) There is no way that the industry as a whole can ever be profitable, and some of the larger companies could run out of money within twelve months. All of the above is just simple arithmetic. In a number of countries, the fall of “AI” will take many other things with it, and probably entail a crash analogous to that of 1929. The Fifth Horseman may be a virtual one.
The second picture in this post seems appropriate for this clip;
“In San Francisco, the impending AI IPOs have collided with a heated housing market, leading to the general sense that AI money will make it impossible for anyone else to own a house. Rents have spiked over the last year, and buying a house has become challenging even for really rich people. “The reality is that a home you could buy for like $2.3 million last year is now going somewhere between $3 and $3.5 million,” says Helena Zaludova, a luxury real estate agent in San Francisco. “You have to be competitive.”
The median price of a single-family home in San Francisco is now $2 million — the highest of any city in the United States. Yet Zaludova rejects the idea that AI companies are responsible. “What we’re dealing with is more intense than I’ve seen before, but also totally logical,” she says, citing a long-awaited rebound after the pandemic numbers. “This is a way overdue correction.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-billionaires-anthropic-openai-wealth-gap-2026-7
I think the descent in San Francisco will be a bit brisker than many other places.
Jerry,
Funny! Pres. Trump has by FAR exceeded my expectation of him.
Of course, mine was the fairly pedestrian expectation that he would shake up a Republican National Committee that was pushing Jeb! Bush as the Most Inevitable Candidate and soundly spank them. Which a TV Star and Businessman was quite competent to do. Whether it sticks or not is a different matter, and I’m looking forward to finding out who they push forward for ’28.
Jerry, consider that there is no great man coming to save us, no Washington or Cinncinatus, and that if a great man appears he shall be by far more likely to be a Napoleon, Kahn, or Alexander. Most of them are, after all. I’d prefer to live my life untroubled by great men, wouldn’t you?
Time has been on my mind a lot lately. How now is the only thing that is real. How the past and future both collapse into the present moment. The past consists of an infinite number of moments, the future branches out into an ever increasing number of possibilities, and for an infinite (or close enough) number of beings. Viewing the infinite from a single point seems a little bit difficult, hence the lack of nuance for the past or the apocalyptic predictions for the future…
For myself, I’m really zeroing in on your Four Horsemen. It seems like they give a little more specificity to how we might collapse now and avoid the rush: use less energy, create resilience with how we participate in the economy, take our health into our own hands, and try to avoid getting caught up in the currents of political turmoil. Your advice has been so valuable but broad, in my mind this gives it a little more granularity.
Here is the clinker from that article I linked to:
“Housing is the least ambiguous case. At age 30, 55 percent of the Silent Generation owned homes. For Boomers the figure was 48 percent, for Gen X 42 percent, and for Millennials 33 percent. The national ratio of median home price to median household income, which stood around 3.2 through the 1990s, reached 5.0 in 2024, nearly matching its all-time high. The median age of the first-time buyer, 29 in the early 1980s, hit a record 40 in 2025. Whatever supposed wage gains the young have enjoyed, housing claws most of them back before they can be converted into anything durable.”
Meanwhile The Rolling Stones have released another album. And while I still hope to be doing the things I love when I reach their age, it begs the question: The Rolling Stones formed in 1962. How many people were listening to bands from 1898 back then?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmwpD79zATo
So lets check whether the population size change from 1970 to 2015 which roughly has doubled from 3.7billion to 7.4billion has been met with total energy availability, so we went from 66406TWh to 162544TWh according to ourworldindata_org’s energy-production-consumption. This lets me think that more than double the energy was made available to the population, so globally we can’t really complain that demand is not being met. Maybe what is left is to look at EROI, general shifts of distribution to actually producing parts of the global population or other aspects if you want to look at the issues you are observing in the developed world.
When I took a night class (for fun) back in 1975, I got to write a computer program using existing data to predict when world resources would start to clash with needs…Yes, it was on punch cards and I used a new language, PLOne…It predicted that the clash would start to occur in 2013-2014……Interestingly, that was when the US State Department spent $6 billion to overthrow the elected government of the Ukraine and install an anti-Russian government…This led to the current war between the Ukraine (really just a puppet for NATO) and Russia…That war now threatens to envelop Europe, since several European countries have overtly interfered in the war…Meanwhile, the US and Israel have attempted, sometimes successfully, to get control of oil production in the Middle East and South America…Iran, one of the projected victims, has fought back successfully with the help of China and Russia, and that war has expanded to neighboring countries….In the words of John Dos Passos in ‘USA’ written, 100 years ago, “Oil was trumps”…and more so every day….
HI JMG: I like your Arch Druid swag!, you look like you are ready to command the forces of nature. In reply to your essay: humans can and do adapt to survive. The Dutch and Venetians saw their cities going the way of Atlantis and they engineered dykes to save them. I have a car that runs on solar panels, and yes, I know it’s used a variety of other fuels to bring it into being from mining, to smelting, to electrical and chip manufacturing.
Here is some good news: the current pipeline to the Idiocracy is changing. To get into top tier Universities the trend is to get away from race-based grade inflation, meaning that “st straight A” high school students who need remedial math and reading won’t be placed over someone with the brain power to get a 140 point higher SAT score. This will improve the health and engineering fields, of course not with greedy money and over charging, but at least with improved competence. Greed won’t go away.
Now if we could only get the young “social justice warriors” to teach people how to grow food like our forgathers did with WW2 Victory Gardens, and manufacture useful things like the Amish, like carpentry, masonry or textiles to share out instead of money, there could be lots of improvement in people’s lives. I’m all for haring out food, skills and goods, not money though. Money is absolutely the root of all evil.
“Did Chesterton give any evidence for that?” As you probably know, Chesterton was famous for a certain breeziness in citations and quotations. I found this in “The New Jerusalem”: “It is really irrational for anybody to pretend that the Jews are only a curious sect of Englishmen, like the Plymouth Brothers or the Seventh Day Baptists, in the face of such a simple fact as the family of Rothschild. Nobody can pretend that such an English sect can establish five brothers, or even cousins, in the five great capitals of Europe. “
Carlos, thanks for the data point. Of course you’re quite correct — optical disks require a much more complex technology to make than vinyl disks, which are early 20th century tech. As I plan on discussing in an upcoming post, we’re seeing a split beginning to open up between cutting edge tech on the one hand, and retro tech simple enough to be sustained on a smaller scale on the other. Watch that gap — quite a bit of the future most people imagine will go tumbling into it.
Gnat, humans are capable of agency, though not all choose to exercise that capacity. LLMs don’t have the capacity at all.
Celadon, bingo. That old Bohemian chef understood; his culture embodied memories from the days before metastatic economic growth.
Michael, exactly. I also note the Russian Oreshnik missile, which — if some of the info I’ve seen on it is correct — can deliver nuclear-blast levels of destruction to facilities deep underground, without the wasteful features of a nuclear blast. That’s the wave of the future in the short to middle term.
Archivist, between the US and Iran, at the moment, and between the US and Europe in the longer term.
Vitranc, especially if the disappointment centers on people who claimed high ideals and then cashed them in at the first opportunity. There’s been a lot of that over the last twenty years.
Chad, nicely summarized. Yes, exactly: once the economy of money separates from the economy of actual goods and nonfinancial services, statistics based on the former tell you nothing about the latter.
Stephen, thanks for this. I’m younger than you, and was in my teens as the 1970s energy crisis unfolded, but I made the mistake — then and later — of thinking that people would notice the obvious lessons and do something about them. It may well be that the sequence of posts I’ve just started will turn out to be more wasted breath, but I feel that the effort has to be made. As for the Great Depression, I wonder if you’ve spent any amount of time in the poorer parts of flyover country here in the US, as I have. It’s really pretty grim.
KAN, oh, granted. I expect governments to engage in increasingly frantic efforts to prop up the various markets in the years immediately ahead, and retirement accounts are always a good excuse; the “Trump accounts” now being set up for newborns are another. I take these as signs that the endgame of the bubble-of-bubbles may be coming into sight.
BeardTree, I take that as a very promising sign!
Lew, glad to hear it! Yeah, I had a good time with that project.
Scotlyn, excellent! Yes, an imperial aristocracy requires a comprador class in its imperial possessions. What makes the US so fascinating is that despite its imperial status, its managerial elite thinks like a comprador class.
David, “remarkable” is a gentle way to describe monumental corruption and total failure!
Seeking, I wish you were wrong. Unfortunately…
Bofur, thank you. “This is as good as it’s ever going to be again” is a powerful spell. I may well be able to put it to good use.
Gunstone, the futility of pronatalist measures was demonstrated in Europe a century ago, when every nation adopted such measures to try to make up for the loss of life in the First World War. They all failed.
Bruno, nicely put! Thank you — that’s a helpful clarification.
Justin, I expect that to be one of the most explosive issues of the next decade.
Aurelien, that seems quite possible to me. The “AI” bubble reminds me intensely of the dot-com bubble that popped in 1999-2000, for which I had a ringside seat — I lived in Seattle in those days, knew quite a few people who were up to their eyeballs in dot-com stocks, and watched the bankruptcies (and one suicide) in the gray aftermath. The fact that the financial media’s full of pieces insisting that the current boom has absolutely nothing in common with the dot-com bubble strikes me as confirmation of the identity. Watch for pundits insisting that stocks have reached a permanently high plateau!
Siliconguy, okay, if a real estate agent is insisting that the rising prices are perfectly logical, then it’s proven beyond doubt that it’s a wildly unsustainable bubble. To quote Keith, whose HousingPanic blog was one of the highlights of the 2005-2008 real estate bubble: “Dear God, this is going to end so badly.” And it did…
Milton, it’s certainly an approach. Me, I see time as a matter of flows rather than of static moments, but that’s also just one option.
KTI, funny. You did a very skillful job of ignoring the central point of my essay while pretending to argue against it. How much of that total energy supply was consumed by the production, refining, and distribution of energy, including all the subsidiary inputs to technology and labor? And how has that share changed over time? Net energy is what’s left over after that, and net energy is what I’m talking about.
Pyrrhus, hmm! Not half bad.
Candy, I don’t think you’ll get social justice types to do that — they generally come from the privileged classes, and as far as they’re concerned hard work of any kind is for proles. That’s why they’re so passionate about supporting illegal immigration — got to get cheap help somewhere, right?
Roldy, I’m not a Chesterton fan, so no, I didn’t know he was addicted to handwaving. I wonder what he would have said if somebody pointed out that the same thing was true of the British royal house…
I think one way at least the Great Depression was better than the coming crisis is I have the impression that the USA was more socially cohesive than it is now and was able to weather that past crisis better than it will the possible coming one. I remember reading that Woodie Guthrie was irritated by the song God Bless America being a big hit in the late thirties and he wrote This Land is Our Land in response in 1940.
JMG,
One of the things I was completely wrong about 20 years ago is the cost of labor relative to the cost of energy intensive alternatives. I assumed that as energy got more expensive and scarce many things based on human effort or human power would become more economical viable and widespread. Instead we have seen the opposite with the energy driven cost of living driving up ( for now) the cost of labor.
So interactions with human employees in our daily lives ( restaurants, retail, service) become rarer, while interactions with technology or energy intensive devices ( self driving cars) become more common. The only group that seemed to have escaped that trap is the Amish who by avoiding any energy based cost inflation keep the scale and cost of the human labor they use the same.
As you have said, it will take the next stair step down to fix this. The value of real estate dropping to near zero, and the destruction of jobs based on business profitability. Then human labor will again become more widespread and attractive.
Hi JMG,
I’m sure you’ll address this in upcoming posts in this series, but I’m wondering something. What, broadly, would be your rebuttal to the claim that the lowered living standards of most citizens of Western nations over recent decades is driven by financialization, de-industrialization (offshoring) and mass migration, rather than energy constraints?. Some would point out that living standards in Asia and much of the developing world have risen sharply as they have declined in the West. Perhaps prosperity, from a global perspective, hasn’t declined at all, but merely away from the West to other parts? Maybe more pointedly: what actual data demonstrates, causally, that the increased cost of energy extraction drives declining prosperity in the West?
Thanks!
Thanks!
“What makes the US so fascinating is that despite its imperial status, its managerial elite thinks like a comprador class.”
Perhaps what makes the US fascinating is that the “locus” of its imperial movers and shakers is so opaque and non-local and hard to detect** that it “feels” foreign, and therefore the comprador class in question may as well sell itself to whoever turns out to be the highest bidder.
**and I suppose what I mean by this is that there is no apparent “imperial” emperor, or royalty, or aristocracy, who can be identified as the centre of empire and creates an “imperial class” in its gravitational well; the democratic institutions appear to have few genuine decision-making powers when it comes to foreign policy, although they perform its public spectacles; and much of the American imperial wealth pump appears to be structured and executed mainly by and through the same multinational corporations and think tanks and NGO’s (the Military – and Biotech? – Industrial Complex) as THIS particular comprador class serves.
@pyrrhus Welcome to the wonderful world of the Mafiacracy! Yes, President Trump is a mafia boss, but he is OUR mafia boss fighting for us against al the other mafia bosses in Iran, China, Russia (BRICS). I like independence, not having to rely on other countries, which we don’t have to if we make our own stuff: from a small household garden in our own solar powered homes to currently being the biggest oil producer and exporter. What have the Muslims or Chinese done with their money? I don’t think they have donated as much of it to humanitarian causes as Western Christians have, I cold be wrong, but if I asked you to imagine a missionary group putting in sanitation, gardens, clean water and homes, a White Christians come to mind. Yes, this is a moral high ground argument, why should America let someone like the Shah of Iran run things? Or the other mafia bosses like Putin or Xi? They don’t care about American citizens or our well-being. They don’t have to, it’s not their job, their job is to care for and defend Russian and Chinese citizens My grandmother lost her leather manufacturing job when it all went to China for cheap labor and lower quality goods.
I see the right/left split as Nationalists (America first) vs WEF Corporate Globalists (destroy nations and divide up the world into corporate monopolistic run manufacturing sections like the Hunger Games).
Yes, fair trade is nice on paper, but it’s not realistic because people aren’t nice in reality, they are collectively and individually greedy.
That includes me: I want MY elected Mafia boss to bring home the bacon for me and mine.
I like having fuel and water to plant my garden and live my life. Although I don’t mind hard work, oil based energy makes life more enjoyable.
Continuing the discussion on solar from another post, right now the solar generation grows very fast in countries as diverse as China, India and the US. https://statbase.org/data/chn-solar-power-generation/ It would be weird if all this growth were just due to subsidies.
Right now the percentage of solar in the energy mix is still less than 10% but the question is for how long this trend will continue (cf. cars ~100 years ago).
Obviously the exponential growth cannot continue indefinitely, but it’s also unlikely that it will stop next year.
JMG 46
> the idea of making a profit (as distinct from earning a living) goes away for centuries
I am trying to picture this. We once talked about the fictional murder mystery series of books by Ellis Peters’ “Cadfael” (a monk) (pen name; a woman). The stories were set around 1100 AD near Shrewsbury, England, near Wales.
In those stories, there were landowning overlords with hireling sheriffs. There was clergy. Human travel defaulted to horses. There were blacksmiths (using high heat outdoors) and whitesmiths (tinsmiths, I suppose using an indoor hearth for heat). There were carpenters/woodworkers in workshops, one kind for making houses and another kind making furniture. There were dressmakers-seamstresses, cooks, shoemakers, hat-makers, potters, carters (transporting stuff and people), too. There were slaves, but they were never addressed directly.
Any books were Christianity-oriented; no reference to libraries. The show did show a scene where monks were hand-copying Bibles. If I remember correctly, books were used as fuel for home fires fairly early, used as kindling. Learning went poof-key. Only “the rich” knew reading and writing, and used it to their advantage. If private libraries existed, it was only the rich. If bookkeeping existed, it was only the rich.
Farmers were there, but what kind of farmer? “Free” men vs toiling for others?
The monk Cadfael was an herbalist. (I think Cadfael got away with being an herbalist by being male and a reputable Christian.)
There was no plumbing or electricity. I think no plumbers and no electricians bothers me most. Looking at self-interest here, no electricity and no plumbing is far in the future, right? (I will be dead by then?, but since I believe in reincarnation, if female on the American continents, I had better apprentice as a cook or dressmaker).
Roads were dirt; no gravel or paved. Although the subject never came up, I assume there were outhouses/latrines, which would have been cleaned out by criminals or the lowliest of peasants.
It hadn’t occurred to me that the Cadfael stories contained almost no profit-making. The author did show peddlers who walked from village to village and sold trinkets for coinage—that was the extent of cash, although I do remember some rich men traveling through town who had a pouch of metal coins.
Actually, I take that back. Now that I remember, there was a market what looked like weekly, where food was traded, at least; I’ll have to pay better attention to the markets. I am about at my fourth viewing of each episode.
For those interested, several of Ellis Peters’ books were put to film in the 1990s, and can be found on Prim Video.
Speaking of markets, an acquaintance of mine, in the 1980s, partially fed her three kids by the lot of them frequenting junk yards looking for vehicle parts which she sold to vehicle mechanic shops. Now that was work-ethic. She was of Polish heritage.
——
Another angle that came to mind is “access to excess.”
(Did I just coin that?)
When I think of “making a living,” my brain automatically goes to Necessities + Some (as in necessities AND some). It is the “some” that makes life fun. When there is no “some,” life is a drag.
If I understand correctly, “making a living” equals “no access to excess.” The flip side is that “making a profit” means access to excess.
In the long descent, adult pastimes would need to be free/no-charge, like kids during summer vacation in my day. We kids had to amuse ourselves. The parents shoved us out the door, and we tooled around to our heart’s desire. We didn’t worry about kidnappers.
Being no electricity, there will be no TV. No TV. Man, a lot of things are gonna “go bye-bye.”
I need to retool my thinking.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Dmitry Orlov in his last interview with Recombination Nation said that peak oil does not apply to Russia, since it’s only 1/3 explored.
Thoughts?
I like graphic novels and bikes, so when I saw a comic about a cyclotourist travel in my town public library, I read it. Its author is E. Davis and its title “You and a Bike and a Road”. I read sn Spanish translation. It seems she’s famous in the USA “alternative” cartoons. I liked her story about her travel from Nevada to Georgia, to some extent. What’s my problem?
First, a situation when she’s going to leave an hostel after sleeping a night, very soon. So the old woman who owns the hostel warns her to be careful with “illegal migrants” at that hour (she rides her bike near the border with Mexico). Eleanor is upset and thinks a person who uses these words doesn’t deserve any chatter anymore. Well, I scratched my head and I thought she could have asked the old woman, why she thought those migrants were dangerous, in a civilized way, for example. If you believe every migrant is an angel, I think it’s as an stereotyped bias as thinking they’re all evil people…Please…
Some days after this situation, the biker meets some nice people, and she confirms they’re good, because they tell her “they hate Republicans”(so I guess they hate their voters too), and she agrees. Well, I think that when you hate more or less half of your country population, you’re in a full tribalist/sectarian mood, but Mrs. Davis seemed happy in her echo chamber. Of course, there’s another tribal echo chamber within the opposite side to this happy leftist cyclotourist, nothing new under the sun…
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This evening (local time), when I was in a swimming pool, I’ve remembered in a flash that some comments ago (OK, a lot of comments ago), JMG answered someone about likely risk of nuclear war nowadays. John thinks there’s a very low risk, because nukes are old fashioned wespons (as I’ve understood him). Nuke warheads vectors are getting more and more weak in front of actual ways of intercepting them.
I think that’s true to some extent, for war planes with “old school” warheads, but it’s more dubious for ICBM and cruise missiles. According the novel-essay “Nuclear war: a scenary”(written by A. Jacobsen), trusting in interception systems like antimissile shields means to be fooled by a fake feeling of safety, fueled by usual politicians to not provoke panic within their voters. She thinks they’re a technological placebo, because she shows some hard data about (ahem) the low ratio of likely interception in hypothetical real war conditions. It’s more difficult than we think to destroy an ICBM before it enters again in the athmosphere, toward its target…Oh, and actual ICBMs usually have some countermeasures to make their destruction even more difficult for antimissile systems.
On the other hand, when you look to the less biased news about Russo-Ukraunian war, you can see ballistic short range missiles and cruise missiles launched by the two sides, usually are difficult to be intercepted in time by Ukrainian “Patriots” and some another modern western weapons systems; it happens the same with the Russian modern antimissiles systems. Kiev and Sebastopol people know this dirty fact. If you notice ballistic and cruise missiles can have dual warheads use…well…do the math. An only one hit in a sensitive target could be the beginning of a global disaster.
I also think it’s difficult a nuclear war starts in a short nor medium term, but I’m afraid “difficult” doesn’t mean “impossible”.
JMG 46
> the idea of making a profit (as distinct from earning a living) goes away for centuries
Part 2
Oh, also traders in salt will exist. And I suppose trading in spices, at least basic pepper(s).
Also yarn-makers and weavers will exist; otherwise, what would people wear? Fig leaves? Leather? And I think there will be traders in yarns of wool (and sheep-herders), silk, linen, and maybe cotton. In sewing clothing, “gathering” will make a comeback (because no more synthetic fabrics like elastic). (I used to like gathering.)
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@alex, I have been wondering how far solar will get us. The EROI in a good location closer to the equator can be around 12 according to some paper whereas places around 50degrees latitude maybe get 5. This is only if the network is ignored, as soon as you need to connect to mains then it gets reduced further. So places that can live with island installation and are subtropical can benefit – just look at Aleppo, Syria and it’s solar panel plastered roofs. In Germany I have doubts as does the govt. Also China produces solar panels with a carbon subsidy, once that needs to be replaced with electric power you could maybe hope for gains from higher energy quality or more efficient production and a more efficient society in general. Also let’s not forget that this part of Asia has roughly a thenth of Europe’s average income, another kind of efficiency.
Michael G # 88:
Well, I’ve read since ten years ago in some sites that China is the new Japan, in hi tech “progress”, usually in an enthusiastic mood. When you’ve remembered how was Japan decades ago (well, during the ‘80s some people thought Japanese were going to be the new lords of the world), and how it’s today, it seems it’s a nasty but likely comparison with nowadays “unstoppable” China, which its usual fans difn’t want to think (cough). Personally, I give the Chinese elites 20 or 30 years of “glory” before some ugly and dirty troubles (they depend too much of foreign oil and gas; their economical system contradicts their political system; and so on).
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Vitranc # 91:
I’ve read your comment in addition to my opinion about current main “reasoning” in favor of unlimited massive migration toward EU, and well, I”m now in my ‘50s, so I’m puzzled, sad and “a bit” upset with the reckless EU and national leaders, because I see my hypothetical retirement pay goes away in the future like water between my fingers… Mrs. Merkel, thank you for your politics (not only for her fondness to massive migration, but for another nasty measures I didn’t want to remember now). We’ll see…
@Candy D
One part of your ” mafiaboss” analysis you might want to modify is the Shah of Iran. He was in fact “our”mafia boss as he was put in power by the CIA and MI5 in a coup in 1953. His purpose was to make sure the oil in Iran flowed to and benefited the USA and Britain. His purpose was to enrich the American Empire at the Expense of the Iranian people. He stayed in power untill 1979 when the people of Iran got tired of him and threw him and his benefactors ( the USA) out. That Iran’s government has been headed by Islamic Clerics since then ( perhaps one of them is what you meant instead the shah) is because they were the only leaders his secret service ( the Savak) could not throw in his notorious prisons and kill off, so when revolution came they were the only ones around. So in a way they are a creation of the US also.
If you want to see the current US city most closely imitating Detroit of the late 20th century, allow me to show you around north St. Louis, MO. St. Louis as a whole has been suffering from the offshoring of its formerly vigorous and varied manufacturing base for many years. Because of the wider variety of manufacturing (beer, chemicals, biotech, and warplanes in addition to cars and trucks) in St. Louis compared to Detroit, St. Louis has declined more slowly than Detroit did, slowly enough that most of the central and southern areas of the city managed to more or less hold their own by residential migration leading to higher percentages of workers in higher-paid occupations. North St. Louis has borne more of the brunt of the loss of manufacturing jobs, but because of the wider base of manufacturing, it didn’t happen all at once like it did in Detroit, and a significant fraction of the folks living there were able to get by through shifting occupations and because they inherited their homes from parents or other relatives, or rented them from relatives who had inherited the homes. Because the vast majority of the inherited homes had been paid off years earlier (this area of the city dates back to the 1800s), those residents had no mortgage. Because they are caught in the straits of the post-manufacturing economy, they have had to cut expenses wherever they could. And because a mortgage-free house isn’t required to carry homeowners insurance, and because the weather here includes tornadoes, severe thunderstorms with high winds and hail, and ice storms that make homeowners insurance expensive, most of the mortgage-free houses didn’t have any or didn’t have enough homeowners insurance coverage on them.
On May 16, 2025, a mile-wide multivortex EF3 tornado cut a path straight through north St. Louis. About 5,000 structures were damaged or destroyed. About 1,000 of these were sheds, garages, or vacant buildings, but the other 4,000 were a mix of mostly houses along with schools, churches, and commercial buildings. It’s over a year later, but only about 15% of the properties in the tornado-hit area have had permits pulled for rebuilding. My honorary daughter and her family, fortunately, had excellent insurance on their tornado-damaged home, which is in the process of being rebuilt. But the whole area has changed character. A couple of months back she and I drove through the neighborhood she used to live in, only the second time I’ve driven through any of the tornado-affected area. It looks like pictures of Detroit. Some buildings were undamaged or nearly so and it was obvious that they were lived in and cared for. There were two levels of rebuilding going on: the kind of rebuilding that is happening through a well-ordered process driven by building permits having been issued to a company that is accustomed to rebuilding, and the kind that is catch-as-catch-can when some extra money becomes available and may well be happening outside of the permitting process. There were buildings that were clearly too damaged to be rebuilt but hadn’t yet been demolished. And there were lots that had been wiped clean of buildings and were returning to vegetation. My daughter kept up a running commentary on who had lived or worked in some of the buildings that were being rebuilt, or wouldn’t be rebuilt, or had been wiped off the lot.
For that matter, it’s not a whole lot better on the street I live on. It wasn’t hit by the tornado, but the same economic forces have affected it. The house next door to the west has been unoccupied since 1990 and it’s slowly deteriorating. In the half block proceeding from my husband’s and my house to the west where the street ends, there are currently two other houses that haven’t been occupied for five or more years. There are at least four unoccupied houses in the 1 1/2 blocks to the east end of the street. Things may not be quite to Depression levels yet, but they are trending in that direction. Go to parts of the rural Midwest if you want to see Depression-level distress.
https://healthexec.com/topics/healthcare-management/legal-news/connecticut-hospital-accused-running-fake-telehealth-icu-led-mans-death
From the land of creativity and innovation: new and exciting ways to ration limited critical care.
I’m looking forward to going over old ground with you once more, JMG. With full irony, and speaking in jest, could one say your predictions mostly failed because “they thought of something”? 😉
Sure, that something just kicked the can down the road a ways, but I couldn’t help but remember that old thought stopper and laugh. Yes, “they’ll think of something” — but that something must be limited by the laws of nature, so won’t do much in the long run.
@JMG (#119), who wrote
“Yes, an imperial aristocracy requires a comprador class in its imperial possessions. What makes the US so fascinating is that despite its imperial status, its managerial elite thinks like a comprador class. ”
I see it somewhat differently: the managerial elite truly is a class of compradors, and thus is right to think like one. However, the imperial master whom they serve is not a nation in the usual geopolitical sense. Rather, it is the supra-national collective of the extremely wealthy, who have no specific geographical home-base that one might attack militarily. And this lack is a clever feature, not a bug.
Of course, their extreme wealth is a hallucination, albeit a powerful and seductive one. And the compradors cherish that hallucination.
(JMG: I’m replying a second time as the first comment didn’t seem to go through. Please delete if the first comment got through).
@A9 #127
I think Dmitri Orlov has drunk the Russian propaganda kool-aid one times too many. Since moving back to Russia, he’s made increasingly bizarre claims. For example, he once claimed that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a “grand liar” on a podcast with James Howard Kunstler.
It doesn’t surprise me that he would think Russia is immune to peak oil. Last I checked, Russia was located on our finite planet but maybe that’s a pro-Western psyop as well 😉
balowulf #122
When someone blames financialization, de-industrialization (offshoring) and mass migration as the cause for decreasing living standards, perhaps the next question to ask is why those things happened in the first place. My hunch is decreasing net energy ate into business profits and the affluent supported choices that kept them from losing too much of their affluence.
BeardTree, that’s one of several important factors.
Clay, that’s beginning to happen in subtle ways already. I’m seeing a quiet revival of appliance repair and shoe repair businesses, for example, which use labor to replace material inputs.
Balowulf, those are also factors. The real complexity of our polycrisis is precisely that global net energy is faltering just as Western global hegemony is collapsing, and various other trends are nosing down. I’ll be discussing this in future posts, of course.
Scotlyn, that’s certainly one way to look at it.
Alex, the fact that solar PV power is a niche-market resource doesn’t make it useless, or prove that all its potential niches are full up. It simply means that it can’t replace fossil fuels to any real extent — not least because of the huge amounts of fossil fuels needed to manufacture, transport, install, and dispose of large-scale PV installations. China in particular has a lot of real estate for which that niche-market resource is well suited.
Northwind, Edith Pargeter (who wrote under the name Ellis Peters) was exceedingly careful to be historically accurate in her Brother Cadfael stories. (I think she was reacting to the blowback from an earlier work under her real name, the Heaven Tree trilogy, which was a real mess in historical terms.) In the Middle Ages, even in those few contexts where money was in use, nobody expected to make a profit; success consisted of maintaining your standard of living.
A9, I’m very sorry to hear that — he used to know better. Here’s M. King Hubbert’s original peak oil chart for the US:
All the white space on the right is oil on US territory that had not been discovered yet when Hubbert wrote. A world chart would be shaped the same, with even more white space on the right (and a tail extending well past 2100), and that includes everything that hasn’t yet been found in Russia, Antarctica, Greenland, etc. Russia’s certainly in good shape to profit from the global peak oil situation, but — ahem — a finite land mass contains a finite amount of oil, and so sooner or later the peak arrives.
SLClaire, thanks for the data points! There are places like this all through the US these days, of course.
Carlos, and thanks for this data point as well. Ugh.
Tyler, ha! I suppose a case could be made. 😉
Robert, fair enough. I need to study comparable cases in which a peripheral region under a pseudomorphosis conquered the old imperial homeland before I can reply meaningfully, however.
Further to the difference between economic viability and financial viability, Thorsten Veblen identified this already early in the 20th C in his work The Theory of Business Enterprise (or it may have been Engineers and the Price System, I’m not quite sure). In that he differentiated between ‘business’, in which the aim is to create and sell a product that meets consumers’ needs, and ‘finance’, in which the aim is to accumulate money. He considered that a lot of the impetus for recessions was being driven by a shift from ‘business’ to ‘finance’ in the running of industrial enterprises. This distinction between ‘business’ and ‘finance’ can incidentally also be seen in the differences of Max Weber’s thesis on the Protestant Ethic and the work by Werner Sombart that he was reacting to (The Jews and Modern Capitalism) – Weber could be seen as explaining the ‘business’ side, and Sombart the ‘finance’ side of capitalism. (Sombart’s book is a funny oddity in that neither the later Nazi readers, nor the Jewish readers could agree within themselves as to whether it put the Jews in a good or bad light – i.e. the socialist-leaning Nazis liked it for ‘blaming’ capitalism on the Jews, whereas the capitalist-leaning Nazis hated it for ‘crediting’ the Jews with advancing capitalism, and vice versa for the Jewish readership.)
JMG and all,
I’d like to do a bit of polling of the community, if that’s alright with our host.
I am a blacksmith and have been working in the trade for about ten years now. A number of factors have bit hard into my sales this year, as I sell things that would be considered luxury goods. I would like to continue my work as a ‘smith (even if it’s part time) and I think it’s time I branch into other products.
It seems to me that there’s a resurgence in interest in old handicrafts and many of these need specialized tools that are hard to find. I wonder if developing a line of modest and functional hand tools is something worth exploring.
What does the commentariat have to say about that idea?
Hey JMG
I noticed in your response to Gnat that you said you have been in a self-driving car before, and I was a bit surprised since it’s not something I expected you to have much involvement in. Could you elaborate on how you found yourself in such a “futuristic” situation, and what the experience of being in these cars are like? As yet they don’t really exist at all in Australia, so I’ve never seen them at all.
Some parts of “fly-over country” were already in dire circumstances by 1990. Back in the 1980s I used to go to a medieval studies conference in Kalamazoo, Michigan; and once I decided to spend an extra day afterwards to visit an ancestral grave in a small town somewhat to the west of Kalamazoo. Boy, was I in for a surprise and an unexpected education!
As soon as I crossed the town line, the paving on the roads changed from asphalt to crushed gravel. The town hall seemed to be closed and abandoned; what town offices still remained open seemed to be housed in a converted RV. The general store was closed. I had a general idea of where the cemetery was, so I drove onward, Many of the houses along the roads seemed to be abandoned, and some of them were even starting to fall in upon themselves. Some of those lots had house trailers parked on them, where the residents seemed to be living instead of in their decrepit houses. I found a pair of locals working in a yard, and stopped to ask them how to get to the cemetery in question. We had a friendly conversation about that and other things, and I began to learn just how bad the economy had gotten in that rural town.
And that was some 40 years ago, in the later 1980s — and less than an hour’s drive from bustling Kalamazoo!
That town represents the wave of the future, IMHO, for most of the USA.
“I think one way at least the Great Depression was better than the coming crisis is I have the impression that the USA was more socially cohesive than it is now and was able to weather that past crisis better than it will the possible coming one.”
True at least broadly. Also in 1930 25% of the population lived on farms. Now it’s less than 2%. My paternal grandfather’s farm slid through the depression without much trouble except for when his still set the machine shed on fire. The maternal grandparents had a small grocery store in farm country and kept things together pretty well too. Neither went into the Depression with any debt, and that is probably a key thing.
I don’t believe that Grandpa got rid of the horses until after WW II. Dad was happy to see the horses go as the tractor did not run across the field to avoid work.
JMG,
I appreciate your consideration of your ideas and predictions from the past and look forward to hearing more about your updated perspectives on it all over the next months.
JMG 80 wrote,
“such as several of those the Democrats are flogging via social media just now — it’s a matter of suicide by cop. (Pro tip: trying to use your vehicle to run down a uniformed officer who’s packing heat is rarely a smart move.)”
I’m independent politically and consider myself a small c conservative with some libertarian tendencies thrown in. I believe there should be borders and a clear immigration policy that is enforced.
That said, I live in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, where a women in a vehicle was shot to death a few months ago by an ICE agent. I can’t speak knowledgeably about the other situations in the country of which you and the other original poster are speaking, but from my study this woman was not trying to run down the officer. It strongly seems that she was speaking politely to the office and, in fact, trying to drive away from him when he shot her.
Again, I think there should be immigration rules and policies that are clear and firm. In addition, I also strongly fear and condemn abuse of authority including police state/thug tactics in which government agents act unjustifiably violent with impunity.
Edward
@Tim PW,
I spent most of my life in my own metal manufacturing business building products for others and those that I sold directly to customers. My advise is not to make a ” line” of products that you think handicrafters might like, but to dig in to each craft in to particular and find out exactly what they need but can’t get, and want it badly enough to pay a reasonable price for. Then make a few and see if people will buy them at a fair, or meet up or something. There is always a big difference between what people say they want and what they will pay for. I was always surprised at what actually sold compared to what I thought would sell.
At this moment in the American Empire, most items made by hand by American Craftspeople are luxury items purchased by the 1%. Every single person I know, from furniture builders, to coppersmiths to bicycle frame builders to architectural metal workers inevitably spends most of their time building items that would be considered luxuries affordable by a few. They are of course building and maintaining valuable skills we will need in the future for ordinary items once industrial civilization winds down. Kudos to you if you can sell hand smithed items to ordinary handy crafters, but don’t neglect looking for other opportunities to sell to the 1% for now.
Tim PW, it might still be considered luxury, but can you manage a long handled digging fork? You would need a source of wood handles. Metal handles will not do, because they get too hot to handle in summer. The one I use, a prized possession, is from an English company which I think might no longer be in business. Hand held small forks are also quite useful in the garden. Can you make the standard North American bow rake?
What about a sideline in sharpening and repair of tools?
I liked your Viking pin. There is a bit of a market for reproduction Medieval and Dark Age ornament.
Hi Seaweedy,
You go! 🙂 Just between you and I, I’ve used lead acid batteries and then the newer LiFePO4 lithium and they are worlds apart. The voltage of a lead acid battery when 50% full, will start to drop enough that the electronics hanging off it will switch off – low voltage disconnect is a thing with inverters. By contrast a LiFePO4 battery at 20% full, will continue to deliver. And there is far less wastage on the charging cycle. My gut feeling suggests that these things are as good as a battery will ever get, and the land of stuff is delivering them to your door for what I’m guessing is a heavily subsidised price. However, do your research and in particular before purchasing watch a YouTube clip of someone doing a tear down of the particular battery. They don’t have all the same internals – not even close, and I recommend viewing the work of a guy: DIY Solar Power with Will Prowse. He’s independent has an engineering mindset, and calls it like it is.
Think of a battery like a balloon. Voltage is the speed that the air exits the rubber thing. Amps is the quantity of air exiting. And Watts is the total volume of air.
Cheers
Chris
Hi John Michael,
🙂 The branding iron would send a strong message, and the response may even be: Ouch!
I’ve never really understood the whole ‘electrify everything’ brigade. It’s one of those things which sounds nice, in theory. In practice, dunno, probably won’t work. When you look at just how much fossil fuels are burnt every single day, electricity is just peanuts. For those who are financially inclined, it’s akin to suggesting that the equities markets are supreme, when the bond markets are way off the charts. And man, I watched this whole debt fiasco thing take off in 1997 and thought back then it would end badly. Like Peak Oil, my thoughts have not changed in that matter, but the resiliency of the systems have genuinely impressed me. You have to admit (or maybe not!) but it’s been an astounding run to get to this point. It never occurred to me that the losses would be papered over so well.
For all of the loose talk about big grid tied batteries this and that, you find out that in the real world, down here at least, there is only about two to less than four hours of grid battery capacity. It’s not much really when one realises that there are 24 hours in a day.
Admittedly for the Australian east coast grid they’re constructing the monster pumped Hydro battery project Snowy Hydro 2.0. It’s big, and could make a difference to grid stability, if we’re not in a drought. Also it will use electricity to move the water uphill in the first place, so presumably that system will only function when there is excess electricity sloshing around the grid – which will be only a few hours per day (the hours which are free at the moment, but won’t be for long if my guesses are correct). It’s complicated, and how they’ll pull off that trick in winter when there is little excess solar, will be interesting to say the least. We’ll get to find out though.
As to health, man, are you hearing about the rise of auto-immune diseases in your country? That’s depopulation for you right there don’t you reckon? Seems good food, solid sleep and regular activity is not all that popular these days – pollution is one of those wildcard things we can’t probably do much about, so ya take ya chances there – it’s what living on a poisoned planet looks like.
Cheers
Chris
Hi Michael Gray,
Respect and 3kWh was what we had our electricity usage down to when living in the inner urbs too. Being in a terrace house with four layers of brick between neighbours back then, meant their usage of heaters warmed the internals of the house we lived in. But also I was younger at the time (it being 20 years ago) and didn’t think about 12’C internal temperatures first thing in the morning. 🙂 Melbourne is a very temperate city.
As far as I’m aware, there is no legal reason a house in this state has to be connected to the mains grid. Dunno about you, but I used to resent the supply charges on bills which I knew were subsidising heavier users. As a wiser person, and from my perspective of today, those charges are seriously cheap. Still, there are some very nifty grid tied hybrid inverters and battery systems these days so you can get the best of both worlds with a bit of independence plus the resilience of the grid. A friend of mine has that exact system. I’m no purist in these matters and the clever person uses all the tools they have within their grasp.
Cheers
Chris
KAN and JMG,
KAN wrote: “[O]f course many still believe that the stock market *always* rises over the *long-term* (JM Keyne’s remark that “in the long-run we are all dead” is quite apposite here). When those expectations change for a large enough portion of society, things will get interesting.”
That is exactly the key point when it comes to hallucinated wealth – it is all about expectations, and the mass psychological herding phenomena that drive these expectations, such as hope, fear, greed, despair and so forth.
Mass expectations as they pertain to financial markets can shift on a dime, and the point in time when they do so often actually has little or even nothing to do with phenomena extrinsic to the hallucinated financial markets in the physical world. Rather, the ebb and flow of expectations that govern mass market behavior are substantally governed by irrational herding impulses that follow a mathematically predictable form of the fractal variety, but without being deterministic.
I think that these relentless herding dynamics intrinsic to market behavior go a long way to explaining why markets, especially in stocks, bonds, and precious metals – have largely – though by no means entirely – kept rising since the depths of the Great Financial Crisis in early 2009, notwithstanding the simultaneously relentless dynamics unleashed by Peak Oil over the same time frame that would seem to push markets in the opposite direction.
There has actually already been an epochal shift in this regard in the bond markets that took place very quietly around 2020-21; and 2022-23 subsequently represented a very wrenching period for debt-based financial instruments and their holders. The rapidity with which interest rates soared and bond prices collapsed in 2022-23 is historically unprecedented, signaling the magnitude of the scale and degree of the fractal trend in play.
Currently, we are going through a partial retracement of those earlier losses, but I would expect bond prices to go much lower, and interest rates correspondingly to go much higher, in the medium term, as the longer-term underlying trend reasserts itself. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank along with several other major regional banks two or so years ago is a further harbinger of things to come in this regard.
As far as equity markets are concerned, I think that the AI bubble will represent the final blow-off, leading to an equity market crash for the ages. Additionally, the relentless grind of Peak Oil-induced decline does seem finally to be becoming a significant enough factor of an extrinsic kind that it is finally tending to press these emotional herding dynamics in a negative direction.
Anecdotal evidence for this dawning realization and associated shift in market-influencing expectations abound in the comments on this and the previous post. Indeed, the very fact that JMG has chosen this particular point in time to resume his own discussions of the Peak Oil topic is a further signal in this regard.
I have asserted that the financial predator class that acts to herd the irrationally emotional prey ever upwards into ever greater levels of hallucinated wealth through various forms of gimmickry, manipulation, and deceit will no longer be successful in doing so in the relatively near term. They will not be able to compete with the ever-growing levels of negative expectation being brought about by Peak Oil. Maybe I am wrong, but if this does happen, it will lead to a turn downward in equity markets of epochal proportions.
In my opinion, the interaction of these fractal market herding dynamics intrinsic to the financial markets with the increasingly undeniable extrinsic factor of Peak Oil and related resource limits merits very close attention by all serious students of the subject of Peak Oil going forward.
TimPW 140
I am speaking of the USA, in general. JMG, if I have something wrong, please correct me. If I repeat myself,, please pardon.
I will give a little background. Back around year 2018, my husband Jethro said he wanted to do woodworking on weekends, making furniture (starting small). Having a personal history from New England, theoretically, I prefer things made with hand-tools (using little or no electricity) (all thought, no action). I inquired, are hand-tools what he meant? He emphatically said no.
Jethro preferred making things with electricity (including batteries).
Good, we got that out of the way. One main reason is Jethro is 65 years old-ish, and physically needs electricity. He doesn’t have the muscle power to use hand-tools.
A thing to consider is as one ages, muscles wane and get more painful. I would guess you would want to give your bod a benefit as you get older. Electricity gives that boost. In ten or twenty years, your bod will thank you. Which is your direction? Hand or electrical?
——
Another aspect is what medium to use? It is fairly recently that I found out there is such a thing as tin-smithing. I don’t know much about it. I gather it means working with sheet metal. Small objects made from sheet metal. In olden times, in parts of the USA, those men were called “tinkers.”
For some reason, I love the word “tinker.” I do genealogy and was looking into a girlfriend’s direct male line. There was a man called “Tinker Dave” Beaty, living about 1820 to 1870s rural Tennessee, actually a pretty famous guy, working as a guerrilla for the Union side in the Civil War. He was a farmer and metal tinker-er. You would be Tinker Tim,— kinda has a nice ring.
When you say “smith,” does that refer to only metal? When you say, “handicrafts,” do you mean hand-tools? Does blacksmithing use only hand-tools, or do blacksmiths use electricity?
Or do you mean some other medium like woodworking and pottery? (both were male in olden days.)
> I wonder if developing a line of modest and functional hand tools is something worth exploring.
No way, not in our current economic environment. The more hand-done, the more expensive an object will command, and you have circled around to making luxury goods again.
If you want to ditch “luxury goods,” in whatever medium, then modern, relatively cheap, electric/battery-operated tools make more sense. Partly because each piece is faster to make, and easier to make, it gets categorized as “affordable.” We are in an era where affordability is a prerequisite to those buying.
> many of these need specialized tools that are hard to find
Trying to find specific, old tools would be a definite impediment. There are collectors way ahead of you. Are you independently wealthy and have ten years? That would make you a collector, not a maker.
An alternative is head for modern tools which give a similar effect. Truly handmade pieces are works of art, and command high prices, although you can charge what you want.
Do a survey of the different types of metal-work that exist (if metal is your preference). One division is jewelry. It would be a stretch for a blacksmith’s hands to be jewelry’s hands. Consult books. See who is within driving distance you could interview and visit his workshop.
A tinsmith around here makes sculptures about size 2 to 3 foot to display in homes and offices, but his stuff I would consider high-end,— several hundred dollars each. His niche is a particular artistic market.
On the other hand, start with an object you would like to make, say, in metal but thin metal. If you buy general metal-working tools, you can switch genres without too much headache. I would advise spending a year to talk to people, read, make modest investments in tools, and experiment to find your niche.
——
A thing I have been wrestling with is what decade will electricity no longer exist — what decade will electricity bite the dust? Just the last couple days, I perceive that electricity will be around for our “lifetime.” A lifetime depends on the year of birth. I will round to the nearest zero. I was born around 1950 so have a different trajectory as someone born in 2000.
I will make an educated guess that electricity will still be around fifty years from now, roughly 2070-2080. (JMG, correct me if I am wrong.) After that, you will have died so it doesn’t matter. At some unknown point, electricity will not be an option.
I hope these words jog (to quote Agatha Christie), the little grey cells (brain)…
You have a mystery on your hands: what is your genre and niche? Have fun on your journey.
💨⚙️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
This is an interesting juxtaposition;
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/07/16/two-thirds-americans-find-groceries-unaffordable-post-poll-finds/
But historically,
“The current official poverty measure was developed in the mid 1960s by Mollie Orshansky, a staff economist at the Social Security Administration. Poverty thresholds were derived from the cost of a minimum food diet multiplied by three to account for other family expenses.”
https://www.census.gov/topics/income-poverty/poverty/about/history-of-the-poverty-measure.html
So needing one third of the family budget devoted to food was the border of poverty. I just checked and my grocery store spending is 17% of all spending excluding income taxes. That appears to be pretty close to normal considering that counts everything I buy at the grocery store including cat food.
And that links back to the article last year, admittedly in one of the more expensive areas to live. The $140,000 may be an exaggeration but the rage isn’t.
“https://fortune.com/2025/11/29/poverty-line-140000-political-rage-affordability-crisis-inflation-cost-of-living/”
JMG,
JMG wrote: “Aurelien, that seems quite possible to me. The “AI” bubble reminds me intensely of the dot-com bubble that popped in 1999-2000, for which I had a ringside seat — I lived in Seattle in those days, knew quite a few people who were up to their eyeballs in dot-com stocks, and watched the bankruptcies (and one suicide) in the gray aftermath. The fact that the financial media’s full of pieces insisting that the current boom has absolutely nothing in common with the dot-com bubble strikes me as confirmation of the identity. Watch for pundits insisting that stocks have reached a permanently high plateau!”
Perhaps we are not as far apart in our views as seemed to be the case following your initial post in this series after all.
JMG,
JMG wrote: “Siliconguy, okay, if a real estate agent is insisting that the rising prices are perfectly logical, then it’s proven beyond doubt that it’s a wildly unsustainable bubble. To quote Keith, whose HousingPanic blog was one of the highlights of the 2005-2008 real estate bubble: “Dear God, this is going to end so badly.” And it did…”
Again, we do not seem to be so far apart after all. What you are appealing to here in reference to real estate markets is precisely the type of irrational market herding dynamic, and associated signal, of which I have been speaking.
KAN, that’s a useful distinction; I may want to take a look at Veblen if I ever revise my book The Wealth of Nature, which builds on a similar distinction between the secondary economy of goods and services and the tertiary economy of money.
J.L.Mc12, a lodge brother of mine who lives in Virginia, just past the end of DC’s light rail system, picks me up at the station in his self-driving car when I go to his place to have dinner. It’s not that different from riding in an ordinary car, except that the self-driving program is oddly hesitant, even on suburban streets. It drives like a little old lady who’s uncomfortable getting her foot too near the gas pedal.
Robert, I’ve been in Michigan several times, and it’s an astonishingly poor and dilapidated state. It reminded me of the less prosperous parts of the Appalachians. Yeah, that’s the future, all right.
Edward, I certainly don’t claim to know what happened in that one case. I wasn’t there — but I’d be willing to bet that you weren’t there, either, and I trust we’re both aware that there’s been a prodigious amount of spin doctoring, to the point of actual falsification, on all sides. That’s irrelevant to my point, however, which is that — like it or not — killings by law enforcement personnel are commonplace on all levels in the United States, and the handful of deaths in the latest ICE enforcement actions are nothing out of the ordinary. Again, I’m not saying that this is a good thing. I’m saying it’s normal in today’s America, and has been for many decades.
Chris, electrification is an idiotic idea in any situation where energy is in short supply, because converting any other energy source to electricity involves huge losses. It’s nearly always smarter to use the energy in its original form, rather than converting it to electricity and then converting it back! As for autoimmune diseases, well, yes — that’s what Sara died of, just for starters. It’s a horrible situation and I expect it to get much worse.
Denizen, you’ll get no argument from me at all. It’s crucial, to my mind, to avoid the trap of trying to make everything going on right now the result of a single cause. It’s precisely the fact that we’re in the midst of a polycrisis that makes things so difficult, and the polycrisis has many causes: the one factor they all have in common is that so many cans have been kicked down the road so many times that they’ve piled up in a heap. The fantastic overinflation of fake wealth is a huge part of the mess we’re in, and intersects with plenty of other factors to make things so difficult.
Siliconguy, it makes perfect sense when you realize that housing costs have risen to unprecedented levels. If rent takes two-thirds of your income — and that’s not uncommon now — you’re going to be poor long before food takes up the other third.
Denizen, have you by any chance read John Kenneth Galbraith’s fine book The Great Crash 1929? That was my introduction to the logic of speculative bubbles, and it enabled me to predict the 1987 flash-crash, the 1999 dot-com crash, the 2008 real estate crash, and the one that hasn’t hit yet, the gargantuan AI bubble-and-bust. That is to say, I don’t discount their impact — my point is simply that there are also deeper forces pulling things the same direction.
Bob #40, re: population control
If you look at animals without, or with very few natural predators (the pike is an example), you’ll see that they don’t outstrip their resource base, but rather manage their numbers by eating each other. Humans do the same in a more political way, and it’s much, much more common and widespread than the machinations of one small group in the background. If you look around, you’ll notice countless little rules and obstructions and laws and “customs” that make it hard for people to procreate, or to rise up the social ladder..
Women outcompeting men in education and thus finding it hard to marry; kids requiring car seats that don’t fit into older models; small businesses being swamped with red tape; agricultural subsidies favoring big Ag and not homesteads, anything to do with social media – the list goes on.
I’ve come to believe that that is not a sinister plot, it’s the human-internal equivalent of a food chain that we inevitably fall into once our numbers require some regulation.
Of course it’s people in powerful positions who do most of this, and who benefit from it. They’re just the larger pike. And there’s ways you can extract yourself from it. The pike metaphor won’t hold here, but think of cleaner wrasse or porcupines as animals who opt out of the game by either being useful for the big guys, or too tough to mess with. You can become the human equivalent of that.
Justin Patrick Moore–re Boomer’s spending. I haven’t seen one in a while, maybe gas prices are responsible, but bumper stickers reading “We’re spending our children’s inheritance” were common on large RVs a few years ago. Always disgusted me.
Mary Bennett–I am definitely with you on the sexual charges that suddenly appear when some part of the establishment decides a man needs taking down. Some such incidents may have actually happened, but if it wasn’t reported, no charges were filed and the details seem hazy I refuse to “believe the women.” As for Kavanaugh, I think his Catholic school training made him a victim of emotional child abuse. Take a young, normal male–tell him that sex outside of marriage is a mortal sin; tell him that even thinking about sex outside of marriage is a mortal sin; tell him that masturbation is a mortal sin, tell him that he is too young to marry because he must stay in school if he wants a decent career–is it surprising that his hormone driven body comes up with the solution of drinking too much, doing sexual things while drunk, forgetting what exactly happened so that all he has to confess is “Father, I got drunk at the party, and there were girls there and I don’t really remember what we did. I’m pretty sure it was just heavy petting. I feel awful about it. Forgive me.” As for the woman who suddenly remembered this incident 30 years later and felt she had to come forward to prevent that teen boy, now a grown man, from becoming a SCOTUS justice–contemptable.
As for economics in times when there is little coinage you don’t have to visualize carrying a cabbage to the bar to barter for a beer. If coinage exists prices are still calculated that way and tallies kept. So the tavern keeper makes a 1 pence mark for each beer. Come harvest time a wheel of cheese is worth 25 pence, so you bring one in and 25 beers are erased from your tab. I think it was Graeber (in _Debt_) who pointed out that standing armies create a need for currency because no one gives credit to a guy who is marching away the next week or who may be killed before he pays up.
I enjoyed the Cadfael books but felt that Cadfael did not really think like a medieval man. He was sort of a male version of females in historical fiction who are really too feminist for their time–feisty and outspoken but never seem to be beaten by a male relative for their actions or attitudes. Cadfael was also seldom actually punished for his persistent disobedience. An actual monk of the time might have found himself confined to his cell on bread and water or similar punishment and would have accepted this as just punishment for violation of his vow of obedience.
Rita
An interesting period historically in that a fourth turning is coinciding with global peak oil. A large faction in the us empire now seems to want to replace its foreign bases near oil fields with foreign bases near uranium deposits. China meanwhile appears to be betting on intermittent generation smoothed out by electric commuter vehicles. We’ll see how each strategy pans out in the decades ahead.
Anselmo (#108)
They don’t shoot the horses ? -> They shoot horses, don’t they
is the movie you meant?
@ Robert M #47
My parents turn 90 this year – I think this makes them your contemporaries? I don’t pretend to know how my father earned the skills, but he was definitely the only fluent typist in our family. I can’t tell you how how often I fell asleep during my childhood to the distant sounds of my father typing and my mother sewing on her electric Singer.
When I turned 15 or so, my father gave me an IBM Selectric – the machine I took to college and typed all my papers on. When I unwrapped my gift, I discovered that he had thoughtfully blanked off all of the letter keys, and also provided a wall chart map for me to use as a reference. 😉 There was probably a book of beginner exercises as well. That gift, together with his example, was the reason that I am a competent typist.
@ Robert Mathiesen #136
Oh my! you said what I was trying to say at #123, but so much better! Thank you!
@ Tim W #141
I cannot really offer advice, but I would like to offer encouragement. I know what it is like to have found a real vocation (in my case, acupuncture) in 2005, and see my clinic business grow for a few years until the Banking Crisis of 2008 began to really bite (for me that was closer to 2010), and my potential customer base became really short of cash. Between the years 2011 and 2020, I had to find other employment in order to pay the bills which never sleep… but, the clinic always ran alongside anything else I did, albeit part-time. I eventually happened on a way to support my (by then much reduced) needs solely through my acupuncture clinic, and have begun to feel more comfortably off – and also much happier – in these last years than I ever did.
If you will have them, I offer my blessings, to the hope that you find the product or skillset that will keep your smithy going (even though you may have to rely on paid employment from time to time). I do know that forge, smithing and furnace festivals are becoming rather popular in Ireland – and smiths are finding each other – https://forgedinireland.com/ for example – and so, may you find both colleagues and congenial work in the years ahead.
@ Tim PV:
Swords or katanas for collectors ?
Aurelien/JMG A small prediction if I may (given the topic of this post is predictions) of the post AI-bubble world, and an irony I think JMG will appreciate.
LLMs are most energy intensive in the various stages of training (generating weights/probabilities), with only modest power requirements for Inference (token, aka words, generation from a model). In fact you can run quite advanced models already on a low power (home) computers – a few dozen or low hundreds of watts – with downloaded pre-trained models. There are also hardware methods to burn the model directly into silicon, which allows for insanely fast and power efficient inference with the downside the model can never be updated (and thus never learn anything new – in a the fast-developing landscape right now this is not helpful as your product is out of date before you can sell it).
So, I predict that LLMs are here to stay for the foreseeable future; but they’ll become mostly static once the large data centres go bankrupt and further training ceases to be viable. Already trained models will be passed around (either burned into hardware) or used on local computers, and utilised for specific tasks. But slowly they’ll diverge from reality as their training becomes obsolete until a time in an (indefinite) future when they are no longer helpful at all.
I see it as the final hurrah of the current social order, which in the same manner is steadfastly unable to adapt to a changing world.
@Northwind #152
Thanks for that comment, and particularly the bit about electricity. I’ve been thinking about that exact thing a lot lately, and I agree with you.
If this ‘ere website is one of the best on the internet (it is); one of the only spots I would personally spend time commenting on (it is); if this community has a flaw, it’s this: it can sometimes be schizophrenic.
What I mean is this: sometimes you’ll come on here and find talk making it sound like we’re going to be widely without electricity in five years, and other times the tone is “gentle descent; things will last a lot longer than the doomers think”.
As for electricity, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I agree with you. Let’s be real: electricity is the very last thing that governments will let fail. Roads will return to gravel; there’ll be “we’re removing that bridge rather than maintain it”; rural internet might falter; but let’s be real here folks, heaven and earth will be moved before governments allow the electrical grid to fail completely.
I do think electricity will become more expensive, with a long period (decades) of ever-worsening brownouts; rural places will lose power for hours, then days at a time, becoming progressively more common.
I think even if coal (for example) that’s left in the ground is the subpar type, I think every back-breaking and human-consuming effort will be made to get it out before all is said and done.
And so as for Seaweedy’s comment above, about investing in batteries. I’ve also been thinking a lot about that. I’ve arrived at the conclusion that it’s something I should probably invest in within the next five years or so, but no, the grid isn’t going down in toto anytime soon.
And likewise I foresee that as solar-and-battery setups become more common, it’s going to be a long time before rural homesteads are completely without power. Yes, it’ll get more expensive relative to income; it’ll represent a significant investment for a lot of people, to continue having power, even intermittently, at their rural home.
But electricity vanishing completely? IMHO that’s a LONG ways off, longer than the lifetime of anyone commenting here unless we have any precocious teenagers (we might).
A few comments, on typing. Way back in the 1950s, when I was 9 or 10, for Christmas, I asked for … a typewriter. and, I got one. An old used Remington. The one’s that were mostly cast iron and weighed a lot. I got a book from the library, and taught myself all the “reaches.” Skip ahead to 1965. My last two years were in a rural, W. Washington high school, with about 500 students. I took a typing class. I really don’t remember if I was the only boy in the class, but I don’t think so. I think my fastest speed was around 110 wpm (words per minute.). I probably still type around 80-90 wpm. And, over the years, I have, from time to time, made my living as a typist, of one sort or another.
When I bought my last computer, and was going over the ordering details, I requested a “real keyboard.” 🙂 Lew
@KTi, well, we have plenty of space in the tropics that could be used for solar.
I’m wondering why China would subsidise the production of solar panels. It would make sense if they believe in the potential and want to get ahead technologically and then sell it to everyone else.
EROI depends on the tech – consider how the steam engine became massively more efficient over time – so it’s not unreasonable to expect further efficiency gains – even if they plateau eventually the way steam engine efficiency plateaued.
@John, I think you haven’t quite engaged with the substance of my post. This is a niche segment now and it’s growing very fast, so it’s not obvious that it would stay niche.
@Northwind Grandma #126
Any books were Christianity-oriented; no reference to libraries. The show did show a scene where monks were hand-copying Bibles. If I remember correctly, books were used as fuel for home fires fairly early, used as kindling. Learning went poof-key. Only “the rich” knew reading and writing, and used it to their advantage. If private libraries existed, it was only the rich. If bookkeeping existed, it was only the rich.
I don’t recall whether I ever saw the TV series, but I was a great fan of the books when I was younger. Peters actually did a very good job of contrasting the feudal, highly hierarchical society imposed by the Normans after their conquest of Saxon England with the tribal, clan-based society of their Welsh neighbours (from whom Cadfael emerged), where expectations of an individual’s role and function in society (and ‘the economy’) were very different.
I can’t speak about Saxon culture, as I know little about it, but while the Welsh aristocracy valued books, books weren’t a particularly important channel for the communication and persistence of knowledge and learning; those were passed on through exceptional memory skills in an oral culture which valued the mastery of poetry above almost all else. The laws of medieval Wales required anyone who aspired to a high cultural status to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of poetry, history, law, and genealogy (a necessity in a legal system in which penalties for criminal acts were imposed on clans, rather than individuals). Oh, and also to be a seer – a cultural legacy which ultimately, imho, was responsible several centuries later for Wales having almost no witch trials….
But, anyway, my point is that Peters’ Cadfael series portrays not one, but two different socio-economic patterns…
Thanks for telling me the real name of Ellis Peters! I was fascinated to find out that Edith Pargeter, according to Wikipedia, was a supporter of the Labour Party until 1949 when she left it because she thought it had deserted socialist principles. I would never have thought that from reading her Cadfael mysteries.
A future decline in net energy is a near certainty, given all the issues with non-fossil energy sources and the incredible amount of energy humanity is accustomed to drawing from fossil fuels at this point in history.
However, I have trouble attributing any decline in quality of life that Americans have already experienced over recent decades to declining net energy. First of all, that seems incongruous with the current all-time highs in air miles traveled and freight tonnage, as well as with the preposterous amount of construction some asian countries have been doing over the past 30 years, and other commercial phenomena. Second, there seems to be a confluence of other mostly-orthogonal factors that can explain changes in living standards on its own, including demographic shifts, a financial economy incentivising urbanization, and the laundry list of declining social capital from the very cogent, worthwhile article posted by Justin above.
As concerned as I might be (and in fact am) that households and communities might need to deal with fallout from dwindling net energy as early as the next few years, I’m not equipped to convince friends and loved ones that it’s even worthwhile to consider it as a possibility for this century. What I’d really like is to be able to get ahold of a quantitative forecast but, as far as I can tell, the data required for that is locked up in the desk drawers of all the world’s professional petroleum geologists.
JMG’s analysis here (and elsewhere) says that we can tell it’s imminent because it is actually evidently well underway. I kind of wish I were convinced of that because it would alleviate all of these epistemic challenges…
Tom @141;
Saw sharpening? Dad used to take table and skill saw blades to a guy for sharpening on a regular basis. That sort one to end when the tungsten carbide blades got affordable. They needed sharpening less and it took diamond grinding wheels which were expensive. But for the moment synthetic diamonds are cheap.
Sharpening things is nearly a lost art.
Seeking…# 104:
“People will give up their single family houses, massive cars, and car dependent suburbs over their dead bodies. Greed and selfishness makes people stupid.”
I tend to think it would be a possible and “popular” stupid decision. Maybe it’s a “historical legend”, but I read somewhere (I’m sorry I don’t remember where exactly) that after 1789, during the bloodiest times of the French Revolution, it happened a serf or another low class person took pity of aristocrats in evident risk (thanks to Robespierre fondness for Madame Guillotine), so this person of these people proposed the high class families to help them to “disappear” toward the exile. How to escape from France? Very easy, disguising aristocrats like common poor people. Often, high class people rejected this salvation plan, because they thought it went against their “honor” and “high rank” (ahem). So they prefered to be beheaded before that humiliation and eventual loss of their life level…Please, if you know more about this story as true or fake, confirm it to me, thanks on advance.
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Anselmo # 108:
Yes, I’ve watched those movies about Great Depression times, and I think they’re good.
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Candy D. # 117:
“humans can and do adapt to survive. The Dutch and Venetians saw their cities going the way of Atlantis and they engineered dykes to save them.”
Oh yes, but due to climate change, soon of after (in historical terms) their new attempts in the near future to rise more and more new dykes will end failing, under the likely sea level rising (how many meters?). It won’t happen tomorrow, but the polders and Venetia are doomed alike in the long term.
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JMG # 119:
“I also note the Russian Oreshnik missile, which — if some of the info I’ve seen on it is correct — can deliver nuclear-blast levels of destruction to facilities deep underground, without the wasteful features of a nuclear blast. That’s the wave of the future in the short to middle term.”
I’d say better “small nuclear blast levels of destruction”, according my non complete online “researchs”. Which it isn’t a joke, for a conventional warhead. I guess if the Oreshnik hits a big ammonition underground facility, the effect wouldn’t be so “small”…
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Candy D.· 124:
“I like independence, not having to rely on other countries, which we don’t have to if we make our own stuff”
I’m in favor of self sufficiency for every country, but I also think that beyond a relative and reasonable level, full economic independence is an utopia. Franco tried it here during the ’40s (“autarquía”) and it was an economical and human disaster for Spaniards in those times. Our last dictator did it compelled by geopolitical situation, not by his will. When he could, he found alliances to make rise again Spain (for example, a treaty with the USA in the ’50s). Cuba and North Korea aren’t very good examples, neither (in spite of their western fans).
The most reasonable political attitude is to have good relations with your neighbors, as individuals and as countries…but not to depend too much of them (a compromise solution, methink).
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A9 # 127:
Well, Dmitry Orlov has a very Russian sense of humor, ha ha!…What could I say about this guy? In the “old good times” of peak oil “community”, he said he was an anarchist, but his Russian Conservative jingoism began to be seen by the smartest people, under his “Bakuninist” fig leaf. This tendence has worsened since the Russo-Ukrainian war started in 2022, so I’m not puzzled by his last occurrence. I bet he thinks peak oil doesn’t work with his beloved country due to abiotic oil or another fake science subterfuge (cough).
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(To be continued).
@J.L.Mc12 #142
You asked about the experience of being in a self-driving car. Here is a funny commercial that describes just that. It takes a jab at the religion of progress as it advertises a classic Italian car.
Never in a million years would I think that I would post a link to a car commercial on JMG’s blog, but here I am… 😂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESED3hWxMiI
What I call the American investment class also has no loyalty to the USA. They happily de-industrialized the USA as they saw an opportunity to make more money through cheaper no-unions, no minimum wage , no environmental regulations manufacturing elsewhere.. Both republicans and democrats cooperated in this enterprise..I remember the assurances in the 1990’s that China would stock Walmart cheap stuff while the USA would keep the fancy high tech stuff as the Chinese couldn’t innovate and be creative like Americans! What folly!As it says “the love of money is the root of evil” and foolishness.
Clay Dennis 146
> want it badly enough to pay a reasonable price for
“A reasonable price” won’t be the low prices of now.
In the USA, prices coming from, say, Walmooch, have been kept artifushily rock-bottom.
An item, now, say, has a price tag of US$5, made in China, could easily turn into, when made in America, $10 or $15.
Existing prices are simply not normal.
A chair one can buy now for $49 will be cost $99 or $149, permanently.
People will have to economize like they did in the 1930s. More and more consumers will learn to either do without, or save for a month or two before purchasing an item, or put things on layaway, or make it themselves.
Americans are already having fits as they watch prices “rise” (in my opinion, “normalize”). As Chinese goods get phased out, Americans are in for the cost of living steadily getting higher (“normalizing”) over the next 20-30 years. I don’t see the increasing of prices stopping anytime soon.
💨🧹💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Signs of times in my town main newspaper:
1-Current Major here proposes, as one of her new measures (10 months before local elections, oh oh…), a help to every new town baby (well, to their parents), to promote birthrate growing: 300 €. Well, she’s a conservative politician, “blackmailed”…err…supported by local far right, so I can guess this populist subsidy seeks to make grow native birthrate. I think it isn’t a bad idea “a priori”, but it comes too late and too burdened by her own opportunist political agenda, methink.
2-There’s happening an apparent hype here about planning new “reverse hydropower plants”. If you don’t know it exactly, a reversible hydropower plant is made linking two water reservories at different height, with big pipelines. When electric power is cheaper, water is pumped high; when electricity is more expensive, water falls down to move a water turbine. And then, the cycle can begin again and again. I think it isn’t a bad idea in a technical sense, but I’m afraid this electric power thirst is a collateral effect of current LLM bubble: data centers need a lot of water and electric power. Do you see any link between the two “fevers”?
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Oh, I’ve forgotten to comment this pearl from Mr. Orlov:
“since it’s only 1/3 explored.”
A reckless statement without real facts, beyond his usual jingoistic bias. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.
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Clay D. # 132:
I think your depiction of “old good days” of the Shah of Persia is right, but I’d like to tell you, that it seems the last Shah made a big mistake when he got cocky after the first ’70s oil crisis, and ws wrong boasting about his power and blaha blah blah. This attitude started to make his geopolitical “lords” to distrust him to some extent. Usual atrocities of his political police/secret services and his shallow modernization got mad the muslim Clerics and well, the rest is history…
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Tim # 137:
No argument here, I also think Mr. Orlov was swallowed since more or less two decades ago by the black hole named “Russian jingoism bias”(indeed, a very strong bias).
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Siliconguy # 144:
Thank you for your interesting comment about Great Depression, but I’d like to tell you our own local historical view about it, from here. 1929 Great Depression hit Europe too, and unfortunately for happy supporters of the newborn Spanish Republic in 1931, that democracy began when the worse effects of economic depression arrived to the country. So do the math…In addition to political problems between left and right radical people (only a few of them believed really in “bourgeois” democracy), Spain suffered a big economical crisis, in a country when most people where illiterate, and were living in the countryside; and with a weak industrial power…This awful situation led to the (in)famous Civil War in 1936.
Economical crisis lasted during first times of the successful dictatorship since 1939, until the end of ’50s: mules were used until the end of ’60s in Spain farms (indeed, my grandparent was for a while a horses&mules seller…
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And finally, a short but I think also interesting question:
What do you think about new “miraculous” technology of sodium batteries?(Some people see them like the Holy Grail for electric power FV facilities electricity storage).
“…converting any other energy source to electricity involves huge losses.” Here I’ve got to disagree. A modern alternator and motor are each easily 90% efficient; the big ones are more like 95-97%. Very few people (besides mechanical engineers) realize that mechanical drive trains also have significant losses, particularly belt drives. In many cases, such as railroad locomotives, the most efficient solution is exactly to have the diesel engine turn an alternator connected to motors at the wheels. (Mechanical and hydraulic drives have been tried multiple times without success.)
Tim the blacksmith, have you considered fire pits? These contraptions are very much in vogue now; folks are spending $US200 and up for flimsy might last one season jobbies from Wally World. Maybe you could do a version that keeps forever. I think a few might pay you enough to make the effort worth your while.
Could you do an attractive rocket stove? The problem I see with rocket stoves that most are so ugly that I doubt very many would want That Thing in their house.
What about a long lasting compost keeper with lid that keeps the flies and rodents out?
Siliconguy 153
> two-thirds of Americans find groceries unaffordable
Thanks for the link. Most instructive.
There are [1-groceries-processed-foods,] and there are [2-raw-food-groceries.]
What exactly are they buying?
If they are buying [1-groceries-processed-foods,] yeah, those are relatively expensive. Heads-of-households have to stop buying this category.
On the other hand, if heads-of-households are buying [2-raw-food-groceries,] those are relatively inexpensive.
I would garner a guess that Americans have refused, en masse, as of yet, to buy a used cookbook or two, and learn how to cook. What are the odds of 90% Americans DO NOT KNOW HOW TO COOK? Another 90% of Americans say THEY DON’T HAVE THE TIME TO COOK FROM SCRATCH. Shame on them.
Raw ingredients, like potatoes, flour, butter, sugar, celery, beans, etc. Am I right? Learn to have the kids mash potatoes. Learn how to buy a cheap roast and slow-cook it in a Dutch oven. Learn to bake bread. Etc.
One needs to look beyond the headlines to find out exactly WHAT habits Americans are NOT willing to change.
I beat the dead horse. I have a teeny violin going between my thumb and finger at the sob-story that Americans “can’t afford food.” The Volga Boatman tune is appropriate. I am not falling for it. Like, whatever.
Let them buy a cookbook; buy raw foods and make the dishes tasty.
💨🥘💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
JMG:
One of the things I loved about the Archdruid Report was that when you did you yearly predictions, you also did a review of how well your predictions from the previous year stacked up against reality. Thank you for continuing that tradition.
On self driving cars, the ones used as taxis, at least in San Francisco, are quite impressive. There is no driver in the car, and they are programmed to be more assertive. Riding in one feels very much like rising with a regular cab driver, just a little spooky. To be honest, they work quite well.
This means no human interaction, but also no awkward human interaction. Also no tip.
Here was also the recent story about a self driving car in San Mateo. Kids in the car were drinking and “shooting” at people with a toy gun. The car recognized this, stopped and called the police. This was a good thing, in this particular case. Not sure if it is generally a good thing.
Hi JMG
Many thanks for the post
On the other hand I couldn’t believe the US is again escalating the attacks against Iran…. I don’t know what you think but for me bombing Iran now is like bombing North Vietnam in 1972, when everybody and his mother knew the war was lost, but Nixon and Kissinger thought ” Hey!, let’s kill some thousands people to see if something improves”, nothing improved then, nothing will improve now, and probably the destruction of oil & gas infrastructures in the Gulf could make things much much worse than the mere closure of Hormuz.
Cheers
David
@ Alex # 168
“…we have plenty of space in the tropics that could be used for solar.”
May I ask who is the “we” in this sentence?
Either you actually hold substantial real estate in the tropics, whether jointly or severally, or you may have inadvertently fallen into the ill-considered habit of rhetorically giving away other people’s real estate…
Christopher, interesting indeed. Those are two of the strategies in process — there are of course others, as nations, corporations, and other groups around the world jockey for position and the Long Descent picks up speed.
Daniel, that’s certainly a plausible hypothesis. Did you ever read Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, in which the predictions made by Hari Seldon at the dawn of a galactic dark age drift further and further out of sync with reality? I imagine people grown overreliant on LLMs facing cognitive dissonance as the same thing happens…
Lew, I keep a very nice Olivetti Lettera 32 in good condition, with ribbons handy. I may never need it, but if I do, it’s there!
Alex, you’re not saying anything that hasn’t been said over and over again since the 1970s. Solar PV’s always just about to break out of its niche-market status, and this or that cyclical boom is the usual evidence. Let’s see how long the boom lasts, and what happens afterwards.
Aldarion, Pargeter was 36 when she left the Labour Party and about to turn 64 when her first Brother Cadfael mystery saw print. I think it was Winston Churchill who said, “A man who is not a socialist at the age of twenty has no heart; a man who is still a socialist at the age of forty has no brain.”
Matthew, the great challenge we face in making sense of the current polycrisis is precisely that so many things are happening at the same time. Declining net energy is certainly a factor — on first principles, it’s easy enough to show that net energy must decline as inexpensive, high-yield resources get burnt up and costly, low-yield resources take their place — but how large of a factor? Getting a quantitative handle on that is fiendishly hard, and not just because so much is kept locked away from public eyes. Yet one of the most remarkable features of the last half century is that nothing has worked right, and no attempt to fix much of anything has behaved as advertised. Conspiracy theories claim that this is because of some malign group of plotters or other; I find that unconvincing, but there’s clearly something very wrong. The undertow of contracting net energy, beneath all the other shifts in who’s doing what, would account for that.
As for convincing people, though, that’s a bar no argument can clear. Pace Aristotle, human beings aren’t rational animals, they’re rationalizing animals, and if your friends and loved ones belong to the comfortable classes in the industrial nations, the chance that any argument at all will convince them that the gravy train is going away a little at a time is too small to worry about. As we’ve seen over and over again, most people will eagerly abandon their supposed convictions and cash in their ideals in response to a little peer pressure or a bit of status panic.
BeardTree, fair enough.
Roldy, you’ve done a neat job of avoiding the real issues involved. Here’s a ton of coal, here’s a boiler, here’s a steam turbine, here’s a generator, here’s a hundred miles of transmission lines, here’s the usual range of transformers et al. How much of the energy in that ton of coal makes it to the wall socket on the other end?
Christopher, you’re most welcome. If the political landscape settles down enough that predictions stop being a waste of time, I may start that yearly tradition again.
DFC, kabuki theater with live ammunition is always an odd spectacle.
I am late to this lively discussion, as usual. Several books have been recommended, to which I would like to add Timothy Egan’s excellent history of the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time. His investigation of the role Wall Street financiers played in supercharging the Dust Bowl is an especially interesting part of the book, and not very well known (at least to me). And his descriptions of the horrible conditions suffered by those caught in the Dust Bowl are unforgettable. With drought gripping the Plains again, a new Dust Bowl is not out of the question, either. While I’m at it, there is also Corey Doctorow’s recent Enshittification. While this book focuses on how big tech platforms exploit their users, the principals apply to manufactured goods and health care as well. Doctorow’s snarkiness makes it an entertaining read, too.
You know JMG, revisiting these ideas reminded me that years ago when I was new to your writings, I was quite skeptical of some of the things you said about the lack of viability of homesteading/”back to the land” type stuff as a way to weather the descent (although I don’t know that I ever said as much to you). Some of it made sense, but I always felt you really overestimated the amount of backbreaking labor involved in subsistence farming. I am myself a naturally rather slothful person, given to cognitive labor far in excess of physical labor, with reading, getting involved in intense philosophical discussions, eating, sipping tea, and (before children) enjoying that feeling of waking up before you actually have to get out of bed numbering amongst my favorite activities. And I’ve always done all right at farm life. But over the years, I have seen people who did not grow up on farms really, really struggle when they attempt it. Even industrious, fit people. It puzzles me, but I think you’re right. My best hypothesis is that it’s some degree of early physical formation (even at my most out of shape, I stay baseline pretty strong and know how to do farm tasks without hurting myself unnecessarily) and a sort of bone-deep knowing that some things *just have to be done* regardless of how I feel about them that sort of circumvents my slothfulness when it comes to vital tasks. Whereas people who didn’t grow up on farms often balk or dither. I am guilty of lazily avoiding a great deal of routine maintenance, of procrastinating, of acting inconsistently–and certainly none of that is an asset on a farm!–but when it comes down to it, my failsafe programming kicks in and I can identify the most important things and do them without having to argue myself into it (or out of it!). I have come to think that if someone hasn’t grown up in farming or worked on a hand-scale production farm by their late teens or early twenties, there’s like an 80% chance that they’ll never cut it. Anyway, I hope this isn’t too tangential to your post, but I just wanted to say that while I love the small farm/homestead life, I don’t think it’s a viable pivot for most people who haven’t yet collapsed and avoided the rush.
(For those who do try it, a word to the wise: the payoff for pasture-based livestock is massively greater in terms of either money or calories per unit of labor than plant farming or even grain-based livestock such as pigs or chickens, but of course you need land).
According to my quick Google only 33% pr so of the energy in coal arrives as electricity after. 100 miles of transmission. Most of the loss occurs in the initial generation process, a few percent in the lines. Natural gas is a little more efficient, perhaps 45%. Nuclear fission also runs around 33%. Hydroelectricity is 90 percent. But the good sites for hydroelectricity have been developed in the USA, Japan, and Europe.
“How much of the energy in that ton of coal makes it to the wall socket on the other end?” About 33%. But even if you can find a load that you can usefully hook up directly to the steam turbine, the number is about 40%. And if you use the turbine to drive a shaft and take off the energy to drive multiple tools, the number is typically 30% or lower.
Now, if you want high temperature heat, there’s no question that direct combustion is likely the best answer. But if you want motion or light, electricity is competitive, at least until the steel and copper run out.
I have seen a few comments about roads returning to gravel. They don’t do this on their own. they stay as bitumen with lots of potholes that may get filled from time to time ,and with broken bridges that may have a dry weather ford around them, and/or a closed to through traffic sign.. To return them to gravel involves a big machine coming in that breaks up the bitumen or concrete.. At least where I have seen this in Cali, that would involve the governments admitting to decline which they don’t want to do. There are a couple of other high profile tourist routes that require extensive repairs after a major storm that the government is loath to admit they may soon not be able to afford ,or even be physically capable,of maintaining.
Stephen
@Clay Dennis #146
Thanks for this! Good to hear from a fellow producer of metal products. Smithing is a hard row to hoe, just as I warned by a fellow smith and good friend of mine. I would hazard a guess that the vast majority of my customers fall in the PMC or wealthy retired category, with a few blue collar workers who have done well for themselves. I really would like to make tools for people with less extravagant incomes, but perhaps that’s just not possible for the time being.
Thank you in particular for the product research idea. A targeted approach would likely work better and letting actual customers tell me what they want.
@Mary Bennet #147
Making gardening tools was the original reason I got into blacksmithing. I make broadforks which are hard to find but very useful for market gardeners and the like. Being an avid gardener myself, I wanted tools that would last and could be easily repaired and maintained.
With the right tooling, I imagine the tools you recommend could be created without breaking the bank. It feels like if I want this to work, I’d have to try a small factory setup where small batches could be made to get some economy of scale. But then again, my mentor always advised against trying to compete with machines because I can’t make things cheap enough.
I do offer sharpening and tool repair services. I don’t get a ton of business there, but it still brings in a bit of money. I also really enjoy fixing things up.
Thank you re: the Viking pin. I agree there is a small but enthusiastic market for that sort of thing.
I’m looking forward to all the future posts in this series, but especially the one about economic collapse. What you say about entry-level jobs disappearing is completely true, and shows every sign of getting worse in the near future. (As I’ve seen it pointed out, even the scam emails you sometimes get nowadays reflect this; they used to tell you that you’d won a sweepstakes or the lottery, and now they tell you that you’re being offered a remote job that pays $18 per hour.)
@Scotlyn #163
The blessings are indeed welcome, thank you. I offer you my blessings in turn if you will have them.
Yes, I have found my vocation and would love to make a living at it. My family would be considered below the poverty level of income here in Canada, but we live modest lives intentionally to make it work.
Thank you for the words of encouragement and for sharing your story. They are appreciated in these demoralizing times.
@Anselmo #164
A quick anecdote: I have a smithing friend who makes collector quality tanto and even he’s noticed a drop in business as of late. Usually the folks with the kind of money who can drop US$3500+ on a knife to be displayed aren’t affected so much by economic turbulence, but there you are.
In any case, thank you for the recommendation.
@Mary Bennet #179
Thanks again for the suggestion! I have had some people ask about fire pits but shipping costs were prohibitive. Making small hand tools for craftspeople is the way I want to go if I can make it work.
@Bofur (#166) wrote, I think correctly, that “electricity is the very last thing that governments will let fail.”
That’s certainly true about governments, for the reasons you state. However, governments may not have any sort of final say in that matter.
Maybe fifteen years ago, if memory serves me right, the Archdruid Report had a commenter or two who actually worked at maintaining the electric grid in the USA. I distinctly remember them telling the rest of us that our grid was actually an extremely fragile one, because it had been slowly cobbled together over the previous century in bits and pieces without any grand overall plan. Consequently, a small number of people with sufficient knowledge of the actual details could quite easily sabotage the grid to the extent that it would take decades to restore it to its current functionality.
I expect there aren’t many potential saboteurs with the needed skills and knowledge — but they seemed to think there wouldn’t need to be many of them to take the grid down. Brrr …
Seaweedy,
Have you considered sodium batteries? There are some coming on the market now that are not too far off from lithium performance. Better in some ways, worse in others. You might have to pay a tariff premium to get them from the PRC– as far as I know they’re the only country making them–but their ingredients may be more palatable to you.
@Scotlyn
(#162): You’re very welcome!
(#161): I’m six years younger than your father. Alas, I am still a two-finger typist, and thus a slow one.
I had to type my PhD dissertation all by myself, as it was about the modern Russian Church Slavonic language and no available typist could handle the fonts, the dozen-or-so languages, and the different alphabets involved. Also, I had to leave carefully measured spaces to hand-letter all the Slavonic text, too, as there was no typewriter ever made for that alphabet.
The finished text was 500 pages long, but with revisions and corrections as I worked on it, I ended up having to type somewhere between 1500 and 2000 pages in all in about 5 years. (And my wife and I were newly married, with two very young children and no relatives within 3000 miles who might occasionally help us out.) It took me several years of very-late-night work and very, very little sleep to get those 2000 pages typed. I barely managed to do that back then, in my 20s; there’s no way I could ever do such a job of work now, in my 80s.
So yes, it would have been so much better for me if I had learned to type efficiently with all ten fingers! Your father did you an enormous favor, as you say.
@ Tim PV and Mary Bennet,
I would not get involved with Rocket Stoves for Residential use. The reason is that any stove to be placed inside a home in the US falls under any number of laws regulating both emissions and safety. Some of these involve the EPA and the clean air act and involve fines and prison.
That is why Rocket stoves are for right now firmly in the realm of do-it-yourself projects or weird grey market items. You can make stoves for use outdoors, or camping as they are not regulated. This of course will change when we take the next big step down and all these regulators and insurance issues melt away to the ravages of actual economics.
To answer another commenter’s question ,I went through the very involved process to create a certified clean burning wood stove back in 2005 when regs were much easier than they are now. I had a medium sized metal working company at my disposal and it took me a year and a half of experimentation, 6 versions of the stove and three trys at the expensive testing lab. I sold these stoves in the Northwest, California and through a dealers in Pennsylvania and Central NY. The brand name was ” Zephyr” stoves. I discontinued making them in 2012 when the next level of regulations came in to effect.
Jesica#160
Yes.
Rita Rippwtoe @ 158, working class women are and have been for decades subjected to verbal abuse on and off the job for decades and ain’t nobody feeling sorry for us. Feminism was supposed to be about citizenship and civil rights, not permission to enjoy an extended adolescence on a 6 figure salary.
JMG et. al. about death by law enforcement: First, police and other officers, whether ICE or the FBI or federal marshals ARE NOT legally empowered to perform summary executions. For that, we have judges and juries.
IMHO, Homeland Security Dept. was a bad idea to begin with, one more unnecessary and expensive bureau-ocracy. Republicans established it and Democrats declined to abolish it. Neither party is at all serious about limiting immigration. Two perfectly legal things could and, IMO, should have been done anytime during the last few decades. 1. enforce the laws we have now, including min. wage and hiring of citizens and legal residents only. 2. establish a nation wide, multiagency task force to investigate and prosecute ID theft and ID fraud. You all do understand this IS NOT a victimless crime?
@daniel #165
The kind of LLM that runs on your computer on 16Gb, 32GB or even 64Gb, of RAM is pure garbage, have you ever worked with these models? They have pretty limited parameters compared with these big ones! They are pretty easy to install them with ollama nowadays!
Who would spend this kind of money to write this hallucination producing garbage on silicone! If comes to that why not write books, or even wikipedia, how bad is Wikipedia is not as bad as these models…
I am so dumbfounded by the attachment of people to LLMs that I came with what I call the LLM garbage effect: “LLMs are proof that if you sit enough around garbage you become fond of it, even fight to protect it.”
John, as a fellow fan of SF and associated genres, have you ever read any of Ian M. Banks “Culture” novels? My favorite, if you either never have or have but didn’t find the book engaging, is “The Player of Games”. I recommend some awareness of this alternate “Culture” universe as a possible aid to breaking out of the doom-loop trap which is very easy to fall into.
Excerpt from a quick internet search: “Elon Musk is a devoted fan of the Culture series by Iain M. Banks, describing the books as depicting a “utopian anarchist” society that heavily influenced his worldview. He has recommended reading the entire series, specifically highlighting Surface Detail as a standout title, while suggesting newcomers start with The Player of Games before tackling his personal favorite, Excession. ”
This is the only far-future alternate universe I’ve read where humans and LLMs come to some sort of happy, somewhat plausible, mutually-agreeable accommodation. Whatever LLMs eventually settle into, being driven around in my Tesla has convinced me they are here to stay in some form. So finding a way to make the best of a (potentially very) bad thing seems essential, because I can think of many ways in which this could go badly. And at least the small LLMs seem likely to make it on a short list of what could and should find a place in a de-industrializing, de-populating future. If nothing else they are really useful for teaching language, writing and probably many other things. In that way they COULD augment our thinking and dreaming — and maybe find another way through what otherwise looks like a very dim future to me.
Humans seem to have an outsized ability to dream far beyond the confines of the ordinary world. LLMs have the potential to augment our ability to remember, think methodically, and maybe even bring into physical form many of our “dreams”. It is better we try to choose GOOD dreams rather than just allow the bad dreamers, and zero-sum-game players among us to drive the bus.
JMG,
Yes, I read Galbraith’s book many years ago, and I believe I own a copy – I will have to look.
How well (or poorly) were you able to time those earlier crashes in your predictions?
Chuaquin#98
If you need proofs of the rise of sea level, in Mallorca there are submarine coves – 30 m. under de sea level ,with fossil bones of a kind of goat wich was extinted 5000 years ago.
https://youtu.be/3U3Hk8BZxjA?is=rN6TKm6qWqHcBTA4
Maybe OT: But .. one of the things people do during a crisis era is to decide “We can’t afford this nonsense” about some long-standing rock-in-your shoe type annoyance, which is good news all around, and which removal simplifies things quite a bit.
Well, recently the U.S. House of Representatives did so. They passed, with a very large majority, a Permanent Daylight bill which made it easy for states to do away with the annoying semi-annual time change of Daylight Savings Time. Three cheers and a round of applause for this. And it was a house of Congress doing what Congress is supposed to do on its own initiative. (President Trump said he was all for it.) That is very good news in a time of decline and useless elites. “Light one candle…….”
I’mnot generally a big fan of Adam Singer’s Hot Takes blog, but he had a lot of good points in this older post, which I gound myself reflecting on again:
https://www.hottakes.space/p/the-kids-arent-entitled-theyre-suffering?open=false
I’ve clipped some relevant quotes.
“A troubling misconception has taken hold of the American populace: the belief that families should not receive any assistance from their parents and should “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” without support, at all times, no matter the circumstance. This attitude, classically propagated by the baby boomer cohort, is a form of cultural propaganda that is oblivious to the challenges faced by younger generations and ignores the very real structural disadvantages they are grappling with.
Imagine a pre-industrial world where a family does not take advantage of surplus resource storage during good times to assist in success through bad. You would say that’s absurd, they aren’t going to make it very long. This is essentially what’s happening now. For this discussion let’s remove any notion of giving money to gambling or drug addict children, of course none of that should be enabled. We’re talking normal, hard working people just trying to survive, during the years this money has high utility.
It’s bizarre to think about the trend of withholding help someone could provide for their offspring if they have already accumulated more than they will ever need. When we stigmatize parents who financially or emotionally support their grown children, it slows progress, and in a society where most policies are biased to keeping the old in comfort at the cost of the young, things are compounded broken. Assisting your kids, particularly during their biologically fertile years, is not only natural, but rational. This isn’t coddling, it’s acknowledging the reality that for most of human history, survival and success depended on family units pooling their resources to get by. It is odd everyone has been gaslit against doing this.
What is most concerning is the nihilism illustrated in the refusal to help one’s children. This impulse to hoard wealth and die with the most money rather than investing in the next generation stands in stark contrast to a healthy civilization, which would hold ensuring your family’s success into the future in high regard”
TimPW 140
STEAMPUNK LAMPS
Speaking of metal + objects, I am enamored of “steampunk lamps.” One can look up the style on the big south amurican ribber. I prefer the lamps modified so they have shades rather than bare light bulbs.
These lamps are charming😍I have fallen in love.
If done by hand and are one of a kind, I would categorize them as “art objects.”
I have not a clue if they sell well, or at what prices.
One could incorporate just about any small object into such a lamp. A lamp could easily have a theme, like seashore, abacus, or telephone.
💨🥰⚙🎛️⏱️⏲️🧭⛓️🗝️📋🧮☎️⚅🁡⎈🛷🚂⚓️⛽️📻🔩🔆💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Regarding public health, if the wildfire smoke currently blanketing much of the Midwest and the North East ends up an yearly event, how bad will that be for Americans living there?
Hey JMG
I think it’s better for self-driving cars to drive cautiously, rather than enthusiastically. Imagine one that drives like a teenager.
On the subject of business being profit-less in the long descent, I just wanted to clarify if savings from living below your means count as profit?
@ Anonymous #210: The wildfires in Colorado are so bad, the state is asking residents to evacuate. My sister and her family were smoked out – have headed for Oregon across the Cascades for the duration. New Mexico is nearly as bad, and DeeCee residents are being asked to wear N95 masks. Here in North Florida, we’re getting a flurry of rains, but pre-rain, the heat outside is like being in a bake oven in the morning, and being under the broiler in the afternoon.
” Here’s a ton of coal, here’s a boiler, here’s a steam turbine, here’s a generator, here’s a hundred miles of transmission lines, here’s the usual range of transformers et al.”
A steam plant has an efficiency of 30 to 45% depending on pressure. Higher pressure gives more efficiency at the cost of more complexity. (As usual.)
“In contrast to a subcritical boiler in which steam bubbles form, a supercritical steam generator operates above the critical pressure – 22 megapascals (3,200 psi) and temperature 374 °C (705 °F). Under these conditions, the liquid water density decreases smoothly with no phase change, becoming indistinguishable from steam.”
Yes, no phase change, no boiling. Some plants have been running at 5000 PSI. For what its worth the Navy usually stopped at about 600 PSI. Ships with 1200 PSI boilers were built and were more efficient, but the maintenance costs were quite high. Except submarines and carriers pretty much every ship now is gas turbines or diesels. The big marine diesels can also get near 50% efficiency. The turbines are not very efficient, but they cheap, small (leaving more room for other things), low maintenance and require fewer men than a steam plant.
The cogeneration plants use natural gas to feed a jet engine that is connected to a generator and the exhaust goes into a boiler which operates a normal steam plant. Daisy-chained like that they can get the efficiency over 50% and have agreeably low maintenance costs too. In principle you can add a third stage and use say pentane as the working fluid. Then the heat from the steam condenser would boil the pentane. The vapor would flow through another turbine and be condensed by a North Dakota winter and complete the cycle. That would be even more efficient, but impractical in practice as the gain in efficiency would be small. (Carnot was such a spoil-sport.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_cycle
Remember to use absolute temperature, so Celsius temperature +273.
There are Carnot equivalents for solar power and wind turbines too. Physics can be very rude.
As for the sodium batteries, they won’t help with cars, but the weight isn’t a problem for home batteries. (Lithium 7, Sodium 23). The question is how many charge cycles, cold weather performance, and of course cost including recycling. The economies of scale with lithium batteries are pretty significant so sodium batteries will have to have some large advantage. As soon as people started looking for lithium they found lots of it so the price isn’t as high as was expected for awhile.
Frictionshift, thanks for the book recommendations!
Jennifer, of course people can get by fairly well on a farm — most human beings have done that for the last 8000 years or so — but my experience matches yours. If you don’t grow up doing it, your chances of succeeding at it aren’t good. As for pasture livestock, the nomadic herding cultures of future dryland North America are listening closely to you… 😉
BeardTree, yep.
Roldy, okay, good; you’ve done your homework. Heat engines are always abysmally inefficient — that’s why the Romans weren’t stupid enough to try to use theirs — and didn’t take off until fossil fuels became absurdly (and temporarily) cheap and abundant. As fossil fuels continue to deplete, using heat engines to generate electricity will be no more viable than using them to generate mechanical torque. That’s one of the things that will drive major technological changes in the centuries ahead.
Stephen, that’s true, of course. “Gravel” in many current cases is a euphemism for crumbling tarmac.
Ethan, thank you for the data point! Yeah, that’s telling.
Robert (and Bofur), my guess is that things will proceed in a slightly less sudden fashion. The easiest way to take pressure off the grid is to allow impoverished rural areas to lose power, and — despite earnest promises — never to reconnect those sections to the grid. When significant poor rural areas start losing power indefinitely, we’ll know that crunch time has gotten a lot closer.
Mary, as I said more than once, I’m not claiming that law enforcement killings are a good thing. I’m saying that they’re a normal part of business as usual in most of the US these days. As for immigration, no argument there, but it almost certainly won’t happen, as most of our big influential corporations — and thus all the people who count on securities from those corporations for their pension funds, etc. — can only make the profits they do by using a labor force of illegal workers who can be paid starvation wages and subjected to inhuman working conditions. That’s why the privileged classes defend illegal immigration so stoutly — their retirement funds and stock investments depend on that arrangement.
Gnat, no, I generally find tech-centric SF stunningly dull. (That’s nothing new; back in the day, Analog was my least favorite SF magazine.) No doubt I’ll put up with a few days of eyerolling sometime soon to find out what the techbro kleptocrats are feeding their brains. My take, though, is that fairy tales of that sort are one of the main things that feed the doom loop, by convincing people that if we don’t get a double helping of Tomorrowland technotrash, the future can only be a squalid hellscape.
Denizen, I didn’t even try. Isaac Newton tried to time the crash of the South Sea Bubble and lost his shirt — and I know I’m not as smart as Isaac Newton. I simply said, “At some point in the next few years there’s going to be a helluva crash.”
Patricia, I hope this time it actually happens.
Justin, and that’s exactly what one can expect from my g-g-g-g-generation: gyroscopically self-centered and destructive attitudes under a veneer of convenient abstractions. I sometimes wonder if growing up with hula hoops predisposed so many of us Boomers to think the world revolves around us.
Anon, that’s been going on regularly for more than a decade now; the media just didn’t make a fuss about it until now. For most of the last few years of her life, my late wife had to stay indoors much of the summer, since her lungs couldn’t handle the smoke. The current example isn’t even bad compared to some years. That is to say, it’s already bad, and doubtless we’ll see a lot of premature death as a result of it.
J.L.Mc12, no, thrift isn’t the same thing as profit. It’s important, and can be lifesaving, but it’s not profit.
Alex@168 says about solar panels & batteries:
“EROI depends on the tech – consider how the steam engine became massively more efficient over time – so it’s not unreasonable to expect further efficiency gains – even if they plateau eventually the way steam engine efficiency plateaued.”
Let me guess: Alex, you weren’t born in the middle of the previous century like I was, and haven’t been obsessively experimenting with photovoltaic solar & battery tech for ~50 years like I have. I strongly lobbied for a solar-powered flight demonstrator with people I used to work with, and our focus ended up with the building of Solar Challenger, a human-carrying and piloted airplane capable of sustained flight on solar power alone (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacCready_Solar_Challenger )
Solar Challenger used tech from the 1970s; it flew in 1980-81. The corresponding solar car by the same folks, Sunraycer, was built in 1987 (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunraycer )
More than 40 years later, if you look at solar airplanes and solar cars, the performance is hardly any better. What’s improved? Costs!
An absolutely killer 200-w N-type 16-bb bifacial solar panel with 25% efficiency can now be purchased from Big Muddy River for $140. A 5 kWh LiFePO4 golf cart battery can be purchased from the same source for about $750. Basic physics says the performance of such items is well into Diminishing Returns (DR). Can you retail said items for 50% of those prices and still make a profit? I doubt it. Can you make items which outperform those items by 50% or 100%? Well, that’s extremely unlikely.
Your points about the improvement of the tech were valid 50 years ago, but five decades of really smart dedicated people pushing REALLY hard on the tech have gotten us well into the DR zone for both solar and batteries.
Personally, I’m willing to predict that we’re not EVER going to see either solar panels or LiFePO batteries get much better, either in performance or cost, from where they are right now. And the pesky Periodic Table argues we’ve used up most all the possibilities. Respectfully yours.
And now I’ve read the downside of Pemanent Daylight – Dark winter mornings in the Northern states, with schoolchildren going to school while it’s still dark. I didn’t know it had been tried and 1974 and found very wanting.
Hi John Michael,
Yes, your life indirectly and Sara’s have been touched by that chronic autoimmune disease. It’s tragic, and I’m sorry for the loss and the pain you both went through. The bright lights dim, swirl and dance. Can you catch a firefly?
It appears that the gene which is consistent to people with that condition is quite widespread throughout the population. It’s the various suggested triggers are what I believe will be on the rise due to extreme stress (and you’ve spoken about that), poor diet, activity levels, pollution. Truly, it is like the decline from historically high literacy levels, we give our societal advantages away, for trinkets. Oh well, people have forgotten that it’s a fight just to stay in the same place. And on that note, how about this oil business stuff? Far out.
Cheers
Chris
Tim PW
Some of the people local to bar I off times frequent have become enamoured with the idea of owning hand made, personalized items. My thought is to make items for people who know lots of people to give my reputation a boost. The bar owner introduces me as the guy who makes cool shale to people who come in when I am there. I also am attached to a forestry crew that want to have personalized items, forestry guys like axes and knives etc. Can’t say I’m anywhere near making a living off it yet, but this is how I am finding work.
@Stephen Pearson (#190):
I saw no evidence, in the impoverished Michigan town that I visited in the 1980s (see #143 ), that its roads had ever been paved with asphalt/bitumen. More likely, they had originally been dirt, and then gravel was put on top of the dirt. Dirt roads were still not rare in the early 1900s in old small towns.
Somewhat earlier, even frontier cities like Joliet, Illinois, (where other ancestors of mine lived in those days) had mostly dirt roads, which became impassibly deep mud in the rainy season. (The other option was cobblestones.) When my great-great-great-grandmother, Caroline Virginia Aldrich, married Uri Osgood there in 1839, they had to cancel their planned honeymoon trip to Chicago because “the mud was too deep”!
(Gt-gt-gt-grandma Caroline was 14 when she got married, and she had her first child at 15. I note that she was quite pleased, all her life, that she had managed to beat out all the other unmarried girls in Joliet to catch such an obvious prize for her husband. He was the first lawyer in Joliet; soon he became the first banker there as well, and eventually he was elected a state senator. He was 29 when they got married. Times really have changed enormously since those days.)
The wildfires from Canada are just another step on the road to America and Canada becoming enemies. Republicans are threatening to levy more tariffs on Canada due to the wildfires.
I second the recommendation of Egan’s book on the dust bowl. I listened to the audio book, which was well done.
If I remember correctly, he said that what ended the dust bowl wasn’t the return of rain but the advent of deep-well irrigation tapping into the Oglala Aquifer. That is being used up and as it runs out, the areas where it does will revert to dryness.
It was fascinating in the book how much of the process that created the Dust Bowl was driven by financial factors, not biological ones. Another example was that prairie was torn up, despite many at the time being quite aware how much harm that was doing, because high global wheat prices made wheat farming profitable and cattle ranching unprofitable. Speculative money poured into wheat farming in the mid-20s and when the price of wheat fell, the speculators were forced to farm even more wheat to make up the difference. That triggered a last spurt of prairie destruction. I agree with Frictionshift that that part of the story is usually left out.
JMG,
I am sure that you are aware of an alternative explanation for profits and have rejected it, but it does seem worth mentioning it in the discussion.
The alternative theory is that profits arise from the difference between the socially acceptable amount one must pay workers and the amount of work that they do. This surplus value is the source of profits (also of land rents and monopoly rents). If this is true, there is no particular reason for profits to necessarily fall due to a contracting economy.
Patricia M, I recall it well. It wasn’t that big of a problem — in Seattle, we normally left for school in the winter in fairly dark conditions.
Chris, I’ve caught fireflies, more than once. Sadly, they don’t last indefinitely. 🙁
Peter, true enough.
Jessica, yes, I’m familiar with the surplus value theory, and no, it doesn’t negate the collapse of profits in a contracting economy. There’s only so far you can cut wages and still have people show up for work, if only because people who’ve starved to death have a high absentee rate! Furthermore, if the contraction is driven by shrinking population, laborers have increased power to bid up wages because they are in short supply. Meanwhile, as the “ghost workers” provided by fossil fuels become increasingly expensive and quality declines, the amount of value that can be produced per worker per unit of time drops dramatically, squeezing potential profits further. This is one of the things that drives dark ages — as society contracts, the amount of value that can be produced by one worker declines to the level that will keep one worker and his family alive. (In many industries it declines further than this, and that’s why those industries are abandoned as societies enter a dark age.)
“Jerry, I’m not at all surprised that Trump didn’t live up to your expectations; a lot of people projected hopes onto him that, all things considered, a reality TV star and real estate promoter with no political experience was never likely to fulfill. It’s crucial to see his career as a symptom, and one that reliably shows up at this stage along the curve of decline.”
Campaigning on no wars, then launching the war on Iran is more than not living up to the expectations people projected onto him. It is a betrayal of his base. And the outrage by many of his strongest supporters (Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene come to mind) proves it.
Re: Permanent Daylight
Why is the focus on making Daylight Savings Time permanent rather than ending it and going back to standard time permanently? Which as I understand it every state has a right to do under current law.
The symbolism of being permanently an hour ahead of the Sun seems a little too on-the-nose for our modern disconnect from Nature in the name of Progress…
Just wanted to chime in again to thank everyone for their input.
Northwind Grandma, I use electric tools to save time but knowing that there are costs associated with it. Any way you cut it, producing real things takes a (hopefully small) toll on the body. The great thing with blacksmithing is so long as I have access to scrap metal, I can make stuff without electricity or fossil fuels! I want to keep this skillset alive for future generations when they’ll need it more than we do.
Ian, networking like that and word of mouth is the best way to sell yourself. It’s just getting one’s foot in the door that can be the tricky part!
As an aside, I noticed on Zerohedge that the US is getting increasingly ticked off by Canada, with wildfires being the latest issue. Honestly, I don’t blame the US for its reactions; it’s time Canada started acting like a grownup and work with the US instead of mocking its southern neighbour while getting many economic benefits essentially for free. And I’m a Canadian!
Hey JMG
In regards to Roldy’s comment on Heat Engines, if I recall correctly I think you suggested that if Heat Engines are used at all it would only be for niche things such as powering ultralight aircraft. I imagine that they may be used for other things, but nonetheless I agree that they will be more scarce in the future for economic and thermodynamic reasons.
But now I’m curious about what “technological changes” will occur to replace engines as a source of mechanical energy. I suppose that you mean new development in machines powered by muscle, wind and water?
Something I’ve previously wondered about as a substitute for modern power drills is a bicycle-powered flywheel that transmits torque to handheld drills via a flexible cable drive, “flex-shafts” I think are the technical term.
Yo, Mr. Greer, et all; I’ve seen several articles recently, about the “annoyance economy.” Which I think contributes to the general feeling that things are … unraveling.
https://fortune.com/2026/02/19/americans-paying-over-165-billion-annually-vibes-based-taxes-annoyance-economy/
There’s also “household administration.” All the sort of useless paperwork, involved in keeping a household running. What do you think? Lew
> I’m seeing a quiet revival of appliance repair and shoe repair businesses — JMG
An investment banker I knew remarked that businesses that involved fixing things always seemed to do well in a downturn.
Incidentally, he mostly worked in the Far East. He said the Chinese were amazingly efficient. He was involved in the buyout of a watch factory. They moved the factory from Taiwan to Hong Kong and had the production line in Hong Kong going again, all in just three days. This would be 30-40 years ago, long before China was renowned as a production powerhouse.
@ Jennifer Kobernik #187
“I am myself a naturally rather slothful person, given to cognitive labor far in excess of physical labor, with reading, getting involved in intense philosophical discussions, eating, sipping tea, and (before children) enjoying that feeling of waking up before you actually have to get out of bed numbering amongst my favorite activities. And I’ve always done all right at farm life.”
This is totally relateable! All of it. Thank you!
One thing I’d add in relation to the most successful *small* farms around here (and there are some), is that they generally have good relations with relatives or friends who can be called on at short notice for what we call a “meitheal” (pronounced “MEH-hull”) – a temporary gathering of people for the purpose of doing a specific farm task. (I think the word may have originated from the Irish for “reapers”, but it is used pretty generally now, even by English speakers who cannot think of a better English word with which to refer to the thing).
There are specific times in the year, and specific necessary tasks, when the labour requirement is extra large with a short available time frame (and when, having plenty of good friends counts for a LOT), and other times when you can let nature do all the heavy lifting… Of course the help you can call is usually the same as the help you can be called on for, so the relationship has to be good.
Personally what I would most like at the moment is an “apprentice” gatherer – a young, fit, teenager interested in walking, spotting and naming and getting to know the local wild plants and their uses, and helping with the gathering (especially the bits that involve bending – lol!) and preparing and processing thereof. Once a week or so would be great. I’m just putting out some feelers here locally, because its not every teenager that is that way inclined. 🙂
“Jessica, yes, I’m familiar with the surplus value theory, and no, it doesn’t negate the collapse of profits in a contracting economy.”
True. The theory of surplus value would say that profits could rise or fall (more likely) as an economy contracts, depending on which fall quicker, the amount of work a worker performs or the amount socially acceptable as wages. In extreme circumstances, the amount socially acceptable as wages can fall below the amount required to maintain even the worker’s own life. Of course, that situation requires intense desperation and cannot last long unless there is a source of surplus population somewhere. One example would be half-starve victims of the Great Famine in Ireland in the 1840s dragging themselves into the satanic mills in Birmingham and Liverpool. Another would be slavery in the Caribbean and Brazil.
What I understood you to say was that when the economy shifts from expansion to contraction, profits must decrease and disappear because the only source of profits is the expansion of the economy.
The theory of surplus value would say that profits might be immediately affected by that shift from expansion to contraction or might not be and that the rate of profit could go down or up during the period of contraction. A sufficiently large contraction would by necessity reduce the total amount of profits, but even then the contraction would have to be severe enough to overcome any increase in the rate of profits (if any).
I am not aware of any long-term contraction of an economy based primarily on wage labor. The societal collapses I can think of are societies that were based primarily on slavery (such as Rome) or land rent (such as China).
Lew # 167:
My father bought an “Olivetti Linea 98” typewriter, a very common model here until the early ’80s. A very hard machine…and heavy, too. Since the mid ’90s, it went to our storage room. We can’t get rid of it yet…
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DFC # 183:
“On the other hand I couldn’t believe the US is again escalating the attacks against Iran….”(…)(and etcetera).
I agree. In addition of your comment about the (second part) of the ME mess, I can remember a heck of Trump supporters believe in a conspiracy theory about a “Deep State” in USA, which is always against Trump “good” ideas, so Donald-the hero- fights against it. There’s also a narrative (which I’ve seen sometimes in this blog) which proposes Trump is wishing to leave the ME mess and assuring the western hemisphere control (a rehashed Monroe doctrine).
Well, last events in ME seems to make counterfactual this stories, but I admit they could be a good outline for a fiction movie.
I don’t discard there’s a high bureaucracy which has an own agenda beyound different POTUS, but today I doubt seriously Trump is fighting against them. Indeed, it seems he’s been under their “bear hug” effect. Another “bear hug” is his submission for the known Zionst agenda…
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JMG # 185:
“I keep a very nice Olivetti Lettera 32 in good condition, with ribbons handy.”
Oh, a good choice for you: It’s lighter than Olivetti 98, because it’s a portable typewriter. I saw it during early ’80s here, it was one of the most popular portable models among candidates for civil servant jobs, because it was easy to take it to exams in a not too big suitcase…
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“DFC, kabuki theater with live ammunition is always an odd spectacle”
I guess you mean it’s an Spectacle of showing power against US enemies in the opposite geopolitical block. Oops, I remember a Spanish saying, which I find very difficult to translate into English with its own full meaning: “Disparar con pólvora del rey”. In the short form, I can explain it roughly to you: When old school infantry soldiers used old muskets in wars, they usually shot the more they could, even sometimes without aiming well…because the king paid it (it was free for them). So when a person or some groups use state funded or not own resources too happily, because he/she/them doesn’t/don’t have to pay it, this phrase is said. US weapons are paid by American taxes, so…
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Tyler # 198:
“Casually”, I’d written in another previous post about sodium batteries, which I think they seem very interesting beyound current hype. We’ll see…
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(To be continued)
Gnat # 204:
“Elon Musk is a devoted fan of the Culture series by Iain M. Banks, describing the books as depicting a “utopian anarchist” society that heavily influenced his worldview. ”
I’m sorry. but after having read this praise by Mr. Musk, I’m not very encouraged to read those books. According Elon ideology, attitude and behavior, I can guess his (bad) tastes, so… I’m afraid I tend to think these “great” stories could be bullshale…Maybe I’m wrong, but I also think life is too short to read every mediocre or bad book in the world.
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Anselmo # 206:
Thank you, though I knew sea level has risen and fallen in some cycles until now since Prehistoric times, usually by natural causes (mainly due to ice ages and deglaciations). Even the known “myth” of an universal flood could be a far memory of a real event of massive ice melting, so…big floods from seas.
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Justin P. # 208:
“Assisting your kids, particularly during their biologically fertile years, is not only natural, but rational.”
I agree…to some extent. I can tell you I’ve always seen in my family how parents have helped their childrens, from my grandparents to my parents with me…always for reasonable motives.
If you help your adult sons and daughters for some wasteful purposes, you’ll end badly because you don’t impose rational limits for your children crazy and fool wishes. Caution must complete love for your family, methink. I’ve heard some cases in my town during the 2008 crisis who lost their shirt, because they helped blindly their adult “kids” in stupid businesses or guaranteed as “avalists” their mortgages (too expensive housing lacking fixed incomes enough to pay it in the long term). Be careful…
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JMG # 214:
“I generally find tech-centric SF stunningly dull. “(…)
No argument here…
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Wildfires in North America:
It’s a pity, but I guess there’s some relation with climate change, so this summer is hot literally every where…I can tell you that, realtively near my town (less than a hour by car), there’s a big wildfire too (by European standards), between another wildfires burning trees now in Spain; so I understand and support Americans and Canucks who suffer closely these eve
@archivist #203
I’m mindful of JMG’s LLM policy, so won’t discuss this further other than to note that while I do use local models as a fancy autocomplete in software development that is surprisingly powerful; I agree with your take in general. What I said in my original comment is not because I think the LLM craze or my prediction are good things; I just noted what I think is most likely to actually occur, regardless of sanity or actual utility.
@JMG
I know you avoid the LLM topic wherever possible; however if you’re looking for a occasional topic to keep Dreamwidth active a monthly open post on a current insanity of our society would be helpful, for me at least. Kind of like the COVID one – strictly bar both the apocalypse and second coming perspectives, and have a honest discussion about what people are seeing out in the world, with a focus on productive ways to respond. For example with LLMs, regardless of what they can actually do, an _awful lot_ of people are now heavily dependent and trusting of them which exposes the actual level of thought and understanding in our society, and what most busywork actually is.
Or not, of course :).
I recently had a conversation with my brother which was somewhat related to this post and may interest some of you. It was regarding the right to repair that Trump was supporting. My brother is a mechanic/welder/machinist/name it. He has his own shop and has 50 years of experience. He works now mostly on heavy equipment, big farm tractors and machinery, and such.
He said he could see both sides of the argument regarding right to repair, and understands why companies like Ford tractors would fight to prevent any alterations to the equipment but he completely understands the bind that farmers find themselves in. Here in Canada, the tractors start at a million dollars and are finely tuned machines that are equipped to remember where the rocks are in specific fields, where the small dips in the soil requires a little less fertilizer and adjusts as needed, where the wet spots are, what the yields were for a specific acre of the 3-5 thousand acres they work, what the weather was like, etc. When the farmer starts his tractor, he plugs in his laptop, and all that information is presented to him. Tinkering with that machinery could cause some serious damage.
But farmers operate in the real world, where weather, time, supplies, and breakdowns are all issues. They don’t have time to wait two weeks for a part, or for a certified mechanic at the dealer’s to be available, because the fine weather window won’t last. They need to get repaired NOW. My brother for decades drove his truck and welder to the fields and repaired equipment on the spot, and if he couldn’t do that, brought the part back to the shop, manufactured a new one on his very expensive machines, drove back, and within a few hours, the farmer was back in business. They refuse to let him retire. (On a side note, when he applied for a permit to build his shop on a residential property located in farmland, the farmers showed up at the hearing. Done.)
My brother said there is a movement among farmers to dumb down the machinery. For example, with the snipping of a few wires, they can bypass the startup mechanism to make it a mechanical switch without affecting the GPS and the computer that monitors everything. They also can take out the part that limits the revving of the motor and replace it with another to rev higher. He says he can hear which tractor has had this alteration done without even seeing the tractor. But while the farmer can tear through the field faster, the effects of this on the rest of the machine is significant.
The issue is the warranty. If a farmer alters his tractor while under warranty, the companies rightly argue they shouldn’t have to pay for repairs the alterations may have forced. After the warranty, it’s at the farmer’s cost, they are free to wreck their machinery if they want.
I asked my brother if 5 older mechanical tractors with 5 men paid to drive them would be cheaper than the 1 million dollar tractor. Absolutely yes. He said there is a thriving business in the area that is finding the old tractors, repairing them and selling them to willing farmers. But the buyers are not the huge farm owners. The 5,000 acre farmers make VERY good money in a good year. Although the math works out to having to pay $100,000 per year for a tractor, plus repairs, because they last around 10 years, apparently it’s worth it. The tractor can last longer if the farmers are gentle with it, which farmers rarely are, less if they run it hard. This doesn’t even take into account the equipment the tractor pulls.
So to tie this in to the post: it seems an insane way for a nation to feed it’s people because the cost of this equipment must be passed on to the eaters of the food. If it costs less to run mechanical tractors, which can easily be repaired by mechanics like my brother, while employing more people, then that will be the way of the future as we proceed down the slope.
A complementary method of electricity rationing is already well underway – outages. Excalating problems are expected/predicted, along with prices, in the attempt to power AI and the surveillance state. Unstable climate is another aggravating factor.
https://electrek.co/2026/07/15/new-normal-the-us-has-suffered-a-major-power-outage-every-month-of-2026/ “About 70% of outages are triggered by severe weather, and another 20% come from equipment failing on its own. But those two things are connected — most of the US power grid was built in the 1960s and 70s, and it hasn’t been meaningfully updated since. Old equipment hits harder when storms roll through, and it takes longer to fix”
A data point: dirt roads are not all that uncommon in rural Michigan. I even remember a city street in a small town near me in the 1950s that had never, to my knowledge, been paved. It ran parallel to a railroad. Years ago, my cousin in Ohio bragged that Ohio had paved the last of its dirt roads. Michigan has never gotten to that point. But when it came to the appearance of poverty, I thought things that I saw in the Ohio River valley, and in West Virginia (Mothman territory) looked more impoverished than anything I’d seen in Michigan. I thought, “so this is where old mobile homes go to die.” On the other hand, in West Virginia, the guys who worked in the mines and in the power plants drove shiny new pickups and rode custom Harleys.
@gnat,
Er, you do know that a Large Language Model isn’t what’s driving your Tesla, right? When it debuted, and for many years after, the poorly-named “full self driving” mode of the not-actually “autopilot” was actually umpteen thousand lines of human-written computer code.
I understand they have switched to a neural net architecture, which is similar to an LLM, but only similar. Confusing the two is like serving tarantula in place of lobster because they’re both arthropods. ‘Grok take the wheel’ it is not. The confusion in terminology doesn’t make your boosterism more credible.
@ Tim PW
In terms of getting the word out, I wonder if you have a potentially stripped down “travelling forge” – something mobile enough to move and re-assemble at (say) a farmer’s market, or a county fair? It strikes me that the ability to SEE you at work might well be what gets people talking. And if you can be making small, inexpensive, easy to carry away items at such an event, the item will continue to “sell” you and your wares into the future.
When I first started practicing acupuncture, I often did attend fairs and festivals and set up a demonstration stall, where people could get a small experience of acupuncture, and get familiar with the concept and results – (if any… of course, not everyone gets a result that pleases them, but often enough someone did, and called me up for more).
One other thing. Do not overlook the sacred and/or religious impulse. The reason I say this is that Brigid is my patron deity, and this hand-forged item is currently on my “to get” list. https://mythicalireland.com/products/large-hand-forged-steel-brigids-cross
And, by the way, yes the whole concept of smithing and metalwork interests me enormously (it is one of Brigid’s many patronages, after all), but, from a practical point of view, the closest I will get to it in this lifetime is visiting one of Ireland’s furnace festivals. 🙂
Patricia M, I’m all for getting rid of the biannual change of clock time. But why make daylight savings permanent? Why not abolish it so clock time agrees more closely with Sun time?
I hope the reason people like daylight savings time is not something as adolescent as wanting to sleep in “late”!
JMG,
There is an upside to entering the period where zero growth has settled in and the fluff is gone and as you have said zero profit is possible. We can examine the case of bob the baker. He inherited his bakery from his parents, it is large enough to support several workers but bob bakes alone because while baking he can generate the value of his wages as a baker ( excellent for his town as the ability to bake bread that is desired at a high rate with low losses is a rare and valued skill). But he does not add any workers because he would have to pay them an equivalent wage that would consume all the gross margin ( money left after supplies and expenses) that new employee would generate in sales, because there is not profit to be had from running the larger business.
But if Bob has a son ( or daughter) and teaches them how to bake they can generate an equivalent excellent wage for themselves ( assuming they become skilled and work hard). Thus bob is better off, because now more of his family members have income . Perhaps they share a big old house left over from the ( profit times). Now there is more money for shared expenses. Bob has an incentive to have more kids and create a larger family with more people in his family unit making excellent wages. Bob can only grow his bakery by taking over the business of other bakers as they pass away because they are unwise and have no kids. The scale of bobs bakery will be limited as no new growth beyond this ” canibilization” is possible.
Bob’s wife becomes a crucial part of this new ” family business” as she is the key to more new family bakers. Her homemaking skills are highly valued as his excellent wage still requires much frugality in the household. The future of the bakery is also dependent on her ability to raise the children ( new bakers) to be thrifty, hard working, cleaver, and efficient. If she delivers to bob at the age of 12 or 13 lazy useless wretches to work in the bakery all is lost.
Bob will be able to grow his bakery and bakery family less if he is in a town or area with other hardworking growing bakery families. But if Bob is located in a town that has a healthy economy but a weak family structure. Such as one with many unmarried baker competition or an extensive LGBTQ baking community ( sorry I had to throw it in) over time his baker family can grow and absorb the sales from those other baking business’s as the bakers pass away with no heirs.
If resources are still available this might eventually lead to a turn around in the falling population and a new period for society.
On lithium: can it be economically recycled from spent batteries? That won’t help with electrifying the economy, of course, but it might with extending the age of (some) electricity.
Canada is going to become the North American Ukraine and America the North American Russia. Mexico and the American Southwest are going to become the North American Central Asia.
“Campaigning on no wars, then launching the war on Iran is more than not living up to the expectations people projected onto him. It is a betrayal of his base. And the outrage by many of his strongest supporters (Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene come to mind) proves it.”
Some of us saw through Trump’s campaign promises for the reality that Trump has a history of not keeping his promises to other people, which goes back decades to his business ventures and also back to his first presidency. So we did not support Trump in 2020 and 2024 and tried to tell people of Trump untrustworthy past behavior, but we were smeared with terms like “commie Marxist Democrat” and “Trump Derangement Syndrome” for not supporting Trump.
About the Iran war in particular, people forgot that Trump has been wanting an Iran war since the 1980s (you can watch interviews on national TV from 1980 and 1986 where Trump says he wants to start a war with Iran), and Trump almost started a war against Iran in 2020 when he assassinated the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. So his campaign promises of no new wars was not credible to me compared to his past behavior, beliefs, and statements.
Chuaquin, et al: I am aware of the dangers of helping and of co-dependency / enabling and how that can grow wrong. I have seen it in my own family extended and otherwise. At the same time, I know one side of my grandparents helped my own at various times. (The other set werent in that position, and the reverse happened.)
I’m jot saying its not tricky.
Now all three of our daughters, early to mid 30s are looking for homes and the market out there is crazy. We stay out of debt, but arent in a position to help them in that area either. Their abilty to build a foundation is more precarious than ours was.
“Canada is going to become the North American Ukraine and America the North American Russia. Mexico and the American Southwest are going to become the North American Central Asia.”
This also probably makes the Western provinces of Canada the equivalent of the Russian speaking parts of Ukraine, and quite possibly we’ll end up seeing a Canadian civil war where the Western provinces of Canada seek autonomy and independence from Laurentian Canada, with possible American intervention on behalf of the Western provinces.
Peter @ 220. “Republicans are threatening to levy more tariffs on Canada due to the wildfires.”
One more example of the Republicans’ strategic brilliance. Just what we need, an enemy to the north on the other side of a several thousand mile long indefensible border.
TylerA #238 “@gnat,Er, you do know that a Large Language Model isn’t what’s driving your Tesla, right?”
Quick search “Software Architecture: A major leap occurred with FSD v12.5 in late 2024, which replaced over 300,000 lines of code with a single end-to-end NEURAL NETWORK, resulting in smoother, more natural driving. ”
I am aware that originally Tesla’s “self driving” was effectively all hard coded. But I think you are completely incorrect in saying it is not a LLM. By that logic, NO application — not even something like Claude (the leading LLM) — is actually a LLM because EVERY significant application I am aware of involves an interplay between LLM and hard coded logic which stifles certain outputs and allows, or even encourages, others.
Is that not correct?
Jessica, Carlson and Greene aren’t Trump’s base. You might try lurking for a while on a pro-Trump forum — say, https://scored.co/c/TheDonald/ — and see what his actual base thinks.
Slithy, I have no idea; I’d rather just revert to standard time all the time, but I’ll take permanent DST if that’s what it takes to stop the idiotic back-and-forth twice a year.
J.L.Mc12, aha! You fell into my trap. (Rubs hands together and cackles like a supervillain) “Technological changes” doesn’t have to mean brand new technologies. It can mean the abandonment of existing technologies, either to be replaced by older ones or not to be replaced at all.
Lew, Marvin Harris wrote back in 1981 about the “disservice and misinformation economy,” and of course it’s gotten much, much worse since his time. That’s an important part of why people are dropping out of health insurance and a great deal more. Another index of decline…
Martin, the Chinese have had 5000 years to get good at that sort of thing! Your investment banker friend was quite correct, btw.
Jessica, ah, I see the misunderstanding. I wasn’t talking about the microeconomic level — the level of individual businesses. I was talking about the macroeconomics of the economy as a whole. Our entire economic system is founded on the assumption that growth is normal — that’s why, for example, we assume that a business can pay dividends without eventually going broke, why money is lent at interest, and so on. In a contracting economy none of that is true, and so arrangements that work in a growth economy break down — as can be seen from the economic history of every civilization in decline. The idea that businesses can be expected to produce more wealth than is needed to keep the business going is valid in an era of growth but not in an era of contraction. While you’re correct that wage labor in its modern form is more pervasive in Faustian civilization than in other cases, there was wage labor in ancient Rome and China, and it unraveled in much the same way that we’ll see in the present case. (Do you recall the late Roman laws ordering each man to go into the same business as his father, whether or not he could make a living at it?)
Daniel, hmm. I’ll consider it.
Myriam, thank you for the data points.
Gardener, a valid point — thank you for this!
Phutatorius, interesting. Thanks for the data points.
Clay, eventually, yes, but only after zero growth has arrived. During prolonged periods of negative growth, Bob won’t be able to make enough income to cover his bills no matter how hard he works, and raw subsistence becomes the only meaningful use of labor. That’s why so many economic specialties go away during the descent into dark ages.
Aldarion, that’s an interesting question to which I don’t know the answer. Anyone else?
Jack, in that case the Europeans had better get started building fortifications across the southern half of Ontario and Quebec right quick, or the US will have tanks on the shores of Hudson Bay in a week.
Gnat (offlist), er, while I certainly understand and agree with your point about socialism, please keep your comments a little more civil, okay?
@Jessica #231: That is an interesting train of thought. I wonder, though, if there has ever been a civilization before ours where a plurality or majority of the population earned wages. If there hasn’t been any, then we have no data on contraction of such an economy.
Jessica @ 224, I seem to recall that you live in Europe. I hope I have that right. Presidential campaigns in the USA are very expensive. Partly that is a natural result of the size of the country. Another little known factor is that the attendant media expect to be pampered and looked after, as do various state level VIPs. Trump’s base got him elected, but his financial backers, largely dual citizen Zionists like Mme. Adelson, do and did expect war in the Middle East. That is what they were paying for. As for his voters, who cares? Not Adelson and Co. Trump can’t run for president again and is clearly not long for this world.
Howsomever, I am seeing indications that Mme. Clinton, Herself, the female (I refuse to call her a lady) who, like essence of skunk, just does not go away, has decided that 2028 just might be Her Year. God help us, not this again. If the Republicans can find someone more or less qualified, somewhat likeable, and not Epstein or war against Iran adjacent, the Democratic Party might be done for for good, riding their PMC + immigrant grifter coalition to the bitter end.
“One more example of the Republicans’ strategic brilliance. Just what we need, an enemy to the north on the other side of a several thousand mile long indefensible border.”
Completely defeats the idea that Trump and the Republicans are interested in a “Fortress America” that John Michael Greer was promoting last year where America retreats from Europe to Greenland. If you’re looking for a Fortress America that stretches to the Arctic Ocean with bases on Greenland, you would want to not alienate the Canadians that stand in between you and Greenland.
Myriam#235
The modern tractors are exposed to several threats: Boycott of the manufacturer, bankrupcy of the manufacturer, unexpected rising of the price for update the software, scarcity of specific chips and interruption of GPS signal.
“Jessica, Carlson and Greene aren’t Trump’s base. You might try lurking for a while on a pro-Trump forum — say, https://scored.co/c/TheDonald/ — and see what his actual base thinks.”
Yeah, that’s because Trump’s base is significantly shrinking after Trump betrayed huge portions of his campaign promises on everything from immigration to foreign policy to health reform etc, to implement the same Bush era Republican policies in his second administration that he campaigned against in 2016. The people left on pro-Trump forums like /r/theDonald are the Trump loyalist diehards who still support Trump despite his betrayal of his campaign promises.
BTW, the Trump tariff threat is a red herring. I am convinced that what Trump, or rather some of his real estate backers, want is ownership of Canadian forest land. I suspect this same faction, or cohorts want control of Great Lakes water. Canada has a relatively small population and vast resources. Please correct me if I am wrong, but it does look to me like Canada could live on its’ own resources.
While I am in no way a military historian or student of contemporary warfare, I do have a notion that Canadian armies and navy have performed well over the past century. Our own military might be large, but is notoriously inefficient. The present administration has completed the task of making the USA hated around the world with the result that in the event of a cross border conflict, Canada could count on enthusiastic support from European and Asian allies. This would naturally not come for free. China in particular wants Arctic access and would extract a high price for its’ support.
Clay Dennis @ 241, considerations like high cost of wages were offset in Medieval times by the institution of apprenticeship. This was a legal and religiously sanctioned contract, in which the apprentice became, in effect, a member of the crafter’s family, living with and being maintained by them, meals, lodging and clothing furnished, while learning the trade. I have read about initial payments to an apprentice’s birth family, to offset the loss of his (usually it was a boy) labor, but beyond that I think the contract included no further responsibility for nor largesse to the birth family.
“I hope the reason people like daylight savings time is not something as adolescent as wanting to sleep in “late”!”
Partly it is, evening people outnumber morning people. (Why would you not want to join me at 0530 to pick blackberries?)
The bigger issue is the Chamber of Commerce wants you out shopping after work for as long as possible. They have the data to prove it too.
@Chuaquin
I’d like to actually defend Dmitry’s Orlov claims, because Russia, has a lot of Arctic territory and under ice, there might be some truth to those numbers.
That could be a reason why Greenland and Arctic was such an interest for Trump earlier at the start of the mandate.
“what we call a “meitheal” (pronounced “MEH-hull”) – a temporary gathering of people for the purpose of doing a specific farm task.”
That’s an interesting word. American English does have equivalents,
“A temporary gathering of people for a specific task is most commonly called a work party, bee, or blitz. These events are typically collaborative, community-driven, or volunteer-based.”
Also a tiger team, which I first heard in the military, so it may be limited to there.
@daniel
If history is any guide because of the AI bubble, an AI winter might follow and usually the AI winter kills the technology that wasted the money and also the other tech under the same umbrella.
Expert systems were quite interesting from a technical point of view but because of the wasted money the investors hated them. This might be the case, people will hate the tech that made them waste money for a while now…
Think just on how .com bubble killed Perl who was so far of the center of the blast… and the .com bubble killed a lot of good things like DEC Alpha CPUs etc before it popped and after it poped Sun Microsystems etc
Money matters, this AI bubble kills a lot of Software Companies before it pops and if history is any guide they will stay dead
When I look back at your predictions over the last two decades, I think you identified the major forces that will influence the trajectory of the world better than anyone else I have seen out there.
I think the reason some predictions did not pan out is because the real world has played out like a Monte Carlo simulation — where each variable is not a number but a probability distribution, so every action in the chain of events can be in a broad range of outcomes. If we add to that the general human nature to behave in sometimes unpredictable way that defies reason, the results can look weird.
For instance, Trump reacting to the changed geopolitical situation and energy crisis by dusting off the 19th century playbook and quickly moving to reassert US influence in South America and Europe — I doubt that was in the normal range of responses the conventional politicians would have chosen.
@gnat,
All Labradors are Dogs, but not all Dogs are Labradors– which is to say, an LLM is a type of neural net, but only one type. The key word in LLM is the second one: Large Language Model. The self-driving mode on your Tesla isn’t responding to human language, or outputting the same. Which isn’t to say they might not at some point connect the onboard computer for responding to voice commands– but that’s not driving. Hence my statement about lobsters and tarantulas. You’ve put yourself in the position of a waiter declaring “what’s the problem? It’s an arthropod, isn’t that what you ordered!?”
You might say I’m splitting hairs here, but again, I was trying to point out that when you are looking to convince a skeptical audience, you need to get the terminology right at a bare minimum or they’ll use that as an excuse to dismiss your points as not credible.
That said, did you notice a large difference in the quality of FSD when they did that upgrade in 2024? I’m honestly curious; I haven’t been in a Tesla since then and wouldn’t have seen enough FSD in action before that to notice.
@John Michael Greer,
The discussion here about Canada/US relations reminds me of my confusion a few weeks back when you referred to Canada as America’s ‘geopolitical enemy’– I, and I think some other Canadians, were quite confused. We were focused on the “political” half of that word, “geopolitcal”, but the “geo” part is what’s most important here, isn’t it? The Ukraine/Russia analogy really puts it into focus. Is it fair to say that at least part of your analysis is that Canada is too weak to ever be fully independent, and if not totally dominated by the USA it becomes a very convenient catspaw for America’s enemies? In that case I agree.
I still don’t get why the USA let Canada slip the leash as much as it has. I mean, yeah, we elected a Eurocrat to run this work camp masquerading as a country, which signals our alignment with the EU. Sure, but that’s in large part because American soft power in Canada has become totally tied to the Blue Tribe/Democratic party– there was semiserious discussion, believe it or not, of begging Obama to move to Canada to rule us after his second term. No Trump, No Carney, and I can’t help but feel that that was a self-own by the Empire. I can’t imagine the CIA at its peak of letting the situation develop the way it has.
There is a distinct anti-Americanism in the founding myth of Ontario, the part of Canada that was settled by British Loyalists in the aftermath of the American War of Independence. The founding myths of the Western Canadian provinces that were created after confederation in 1863, and of Newfoundland which only joined Canada in 1949, don’t have an anti-Americanism embedded in their founding myth because they aren’t founded by British Loyalists looking to escape America:
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/GarrisonMentalityAntiAmericanism.pdf
The Quebec founding myth also is different because they trace their origins to France rather than to the British colonists who fled the thirteen colonies, so their anti-Americanism when it exists, is more like anti-Americanism of France, than the anti-Americanism of Ontario.
As a result, Canada, like the United States, really is a confederation that consists of multiple nations each with their own founding myths. Eventually, the individual nations of Canada are going to fundamentally disagree with each other on values and worldviews and end up going their own ways. Some of them are going to be anti-American, others pro-American, and still others neutral.
Unfortunately for anybody looking for a pro-American Canada, Canadian national politics and Canadian media is dominated by the attitudes of Canadians living in Ontario, who as explained above, have a latent anti-Americanism that can be activated at any time by any politician looking to blame an external enemy, such as the Liberal Party looking to blame Trump and the Republicans. Which means that in the short term, Canada and the United States will only continue to separate from each other until they eventually become enemies with each other.
Maybe the western half of Canada will break off, and maybe Newfoundland and the other maritime provinces will go its own way. But the core of Canada in Ontario and Quebec, which was considered Canada from before confederation, are likely to still become and remain anti-American in the near future.
Came across this today, another sign of how The future isn’t going as planned.
Economists of today can explain why yesterdays predictions of tomorrow are wrong. 😉
US electric car outlook tumbles as 2030 sales forecast falls from 48% to 17%
https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/us-electric-car-outlook-tumbles-200700626.html
“Completely defeats the idea that Trump and the Republicans are interested in a “Fortress America” that John Michael Greer was promoting last year where America retreats from Europe to Greenland. If you’re looking for a Fortress America that stretches to the Arctic Ocean with bases on Greenland, you would want to not alienate the Canadians that stand in between you and Greenland.”
Maybe Trump wouldn’t be so anti-Canada if Mark Carney wasn’t trying to form alliances with the Chinese against the interests of America.
Anon, Trump’s base was never a single bloc, and it hasn’t remained static; like any successful American politician, Trump presides over a coalition that is constantly gaining and losing members as his policy positions shift. The emerging civil war in the Democratic party between the old guard and the DSA has given him more room to maneuver, and thus to carry out policies he’s had in mind for decades, whether or not those are popular with the faction you support. As for the fortress America concept, the game’s far from over yet, and what kind of government Canada ends up with — if it remains (a) one country and (b) independent, neither of which is guaranteed — is anyone’s guess at this point.
Mary, I think you’re quite correct about Trump’s Canadian policies, but there are two military issues to keep in mind. The first is that Canada’s military is extremely small and would provide no real obstacle to an invasion. (I grant it performed well the last time it fought, but that was the Second World War.) The second is that Europe is catastrophically overextended in Ukraine right now, and the only support it could offer Canada in such a scenario is verbal. China’s another matter, of course, but the Iranian situation has shown that China’s open to backchannel diplomacy and deal-cutting on such issues; as the US withdraws from its global commitments, turning a blind eye toward its moves on Taiwan would be one obvious option. Still, we’ll see.
Ramaraj, one of the reasons I’ve stopped doing annual predictions is that at this point so much depends on the actions of individual politicians that the kind of broad-trend predicting I’ve done in the past is hopelessly inadequate just now.
TylerA, keep in mind that right now the US government and the elite classes that run it are fractured and squabbling, and thus unable to pursue a coherent policy in any area. Those factions that support the old status quo are doubtless doing everything they can to make Canada as big an irritant to the Trump administration as possible, while those that support the emerging populist consensus are doing the opposite. Meanwhile, as Mary pointed out, the EU and China both have obvious interests in this situation. We’ll probably have to wait most of a decade for the rubble to stop bouncing down here and a new US elite consensus to take shape, and in the meantime things will be decidedly chaotic.
John, thanks for this. It’ll be interesting, in the sense of the apocryphal Chinese curse, to see if that mutual hostility can be resolved in a non-kinetic way.
Michael, that is to say, electric cars are going through the same boom-and-bust cycle that we’ve seen over more than a century now in renewable-energy technologies: they rise on ideology, and then fall as economics takes over. It’s an old story, going all the way back to Augustin Mouchot’s solar steam engines in the 1870s.
“I still don’t get why the USA let Canada slip the leash as much as it has. I mean, yeah, we elected a Eurocrat to run this work camp masquerading as a country, which signals our alignment with the EU. Sure, but that’s in large part because American soft power in Canada has become totally tied to the Blue Tribe/Democratic party– there was semiserious discussion, believe it or not, of begging Obama to move to Canada to rule us after his second term. No Trump, No Carney, and I can’t help but feel that that was a self-own by the Empire. I can’t imagine the CIA at its peak of letting the situation develop the way it has.”
I think somebody in the comment section of a previous blog post said that the CIA and other parts of the national security state / three letter agencies are by and large part of the political coalition in the Democratic Party. If this is the case, then Trump, by fighting against the Democrats while in power, will end up fighting against anything associated with the CIA, including any efforts by the CIA to prop up existing European and Canadian governments.
Also, there’s a big difference between the American empire and the American people. There are plenty of American isolationists and peaceniks who want to wind down the American empire and focus on domestic issues and don’t care about what’s going on in Canada and in other parts of the world. Canada becomes anti-American and they’re like, we don’t care what Canada thinks because we’re too busy focusing on America’s problems.
My take on the daylight savings debate: My daughter and her friends now, and I when I was working, like to do things after work like hike, surf, bike, garden., play sports. It is much more difficult to do them in the morning and then get ready for work. Even the kids who may have to leave for school in the dark for a couple of months will have more time to play outdoors after school. I realize most kids don’t play outdoors anymore, but they have the chance. I would be in favor of daylight savings all year long.
Both Hawaii and Mexico have winter time all year round, but Hawaii is tropical, as is the part of Mexico where I live, so it doesn’t make as much difference.
Stephen
“The second is that Europe is catastrophically overextended in Ukraine right now, and the only support it could offer Canada in such a scenario is verbal. China’s another matter, of course, but the Iranian situation has shown that China’s open to backchannel diplomacy and deal-cutting on such issues; as the US withdraws from its global commitments, turning a blind eye toward its moves on Taiwan would be one obvious option.”
There is also the possibility that the Russians or Indians might support Canada against the United States.
Commercial recycling of lithium ion batteries does occur – mostly in China – but there is an American company that does it:
https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/recycle-with-us/
@John (#264):
And of course, here in the USA, there was a very long and strong tradition of anti-Ontario (often generalized to anti-Canada) passion, due to those same British-Empire Loyalists who had fled there. One now forgotten expression of this was that until the early 1900s, US military war-gaming usually assumed the posited military adversary would be the British Empire, including Canada. The passions of 1776 died down very, very slowly.
Also, Quebec is obviously a different case. One of my great-great-great grandfathers was Louis Lussier, the man who shot and killed the British officer, Major Weir, during the Patriots’ War of the 1830s. He was arrested and entenced to hang, but managed to break out of the Montreal prison in some still unexplained way and flee to St. Louis, MO, where he lived openly for a few decades, quite safe from British justice. For Quebec, the US could be a haven from the oppression of the British Empire.
Russia/Ukraine isn’t the only possible analogy for America and Canada. There’s also England/Ireland in the British Isles for what used to be the British Empire, and Spain/Portugal in the Iberian peninsula for what used to be the Iberian Union. Historic enemies that became united under an empire, and then as that empire went away, went back to being historic enemies. You might be able to find other such examples from other empires around the world and throughout history.
Maybe my first comment on daylight savings time wasn’t clear – I say sleeping in “late” in scare quotes because it isn’t late in Sun terms.
What stops schools and workplaces from beginning an hour earlier in summer – say 7am instead of 8am and 8am instead of 9am, if their members want to do so? That would allow them to have more time for outdoor activities, shopping or whatever it is that they are like or are supposed to do. It doesn’t require a legally imposed clock change for everybody.
In hotter countries, it is quite usual for school and work to begin earlier in summer because the midday heat is so murderous.
It seems to me people have an illusion that getting up at 7 am with Daylight Savings is less painful than getting up at 6 am on natural time, even though it is exactly the same.
I was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1957 and lived there until 1971. At that time, before the auto industry crashed and burned, southern lower Michigan, which is where the vast majority of the state’s population lives, was doing well economically because the auto industry was doing well. As another commenter pointed out, at that time there were many gravel roads in southern lower Michigan. We traveled on two of them for several miles to get from the closest paved road to my paternal grandparents’ summer cottage on the shore of Clear Lake, halfway between Ann Arbor and Jackson. Gravel is a plentiful resource in southern lower Michigan due to the kettle moraines left there when the glaciers receded. The moraine is composed of sand and gravel, and there are many gravel and sand pit mines located along the moraines. We passed one of them on the way to my grandparents’ cottage. Michigan doesn’t have any oil, so it makes sense from a cost standpoint to pave as many roads as the population will tolerate with gravel.
Sunrise and sunset times are widely different across the US due to its large size. In Tampa, Florida the winter solstice sunrise and sunset (EST) are at 7:15am and 5:40pm respectively. Summer solstice sunrise and sunset (EDT) are at 6:33am and 8:30pm. Going an hour later for winter wouldn’t be too dark for children going to school, while the later winter sunset would be welcomed by day shift workers. Summer DST is about perfect in terms of matching to usual economic activities. So it makes sense that Florida wants permanent DST.
For Jackson, Michigan, which is much farther north and also near the western edge of the Eastern time zone, winter solstice sunrise and sunset (EST) are at 8:03am and 5:08pm respectively, while summer solstice sunrise and sunset (EDT) are at 6:01am and 9:17pm. Michigan stayed on standard time all year round when I lived there, so the sun rose at 5:01am and set at 8:17pm EST at the summer solstice. Thus standard time would work well enough for most people in Michigan, but going to EDT in the winter would mean the sun wouldn’t rise until 9:03am. I don’t think parents who let their children walk to school would want them to walk there an hour or more before sunrise.
The issue of whether or not to go to permanent Daylight Savings Time is one that should be made at the state rather than the national level. What makes sense for Florida doesn’t make sense for Michigan, and so on. Let each state decide what makes the most sense for that state and implement it.
JMG, I take it, then, that you are going to punt on my follow up question, which is to try to time the impending crash of the AI bubble? Are you willing to hazard even a roughly approximate guess?
(For what it’s worth, I would not even be asking if I did not hold your views on these matters in extremely high regard – in higher regard, in fact, than that of any other thoughtful student of peak oil, and therefore, a fortiori, in MUCH higher regard than the views of any of the rest of humanity that is either oblivious to, or insistently denies, the reality of Peak Oil.)
If you do not want to take a crack at the previous question, then how about the following, less risky question: What, in your view, are the principal factors in play right now – both endogenous to the hallucinated markets and exogenous in the real material world – that you see as helping to shape and determine the timing of the upcoming crash?
For my part, I am trying to develop a theoretical framework to help understand how the fractal forms governed by endogenously necessary mathematical laws in their development nevertheless are also at the same time the effect of exogenous factors in the real material world of non-hallucinated emotional wealth. I need to give the matter some more thought, though, before I post about it.
Hi Aldarion,
As far as I’m aware, down under at least, I believe that there are no facilities to recycle lithium batteries. And the joke is, you use the word ‘lithium’, but there are heaps of differing chemical variants, like the power tool ones which have Cobalt in them. Or there are others with titanium etc. As to LiFePO4 variants, at the moment there is simply not much money to be made from recycling iron (Fe) and Phosphate (PO), so it costs to get rid of this stuff.
It’s like the product glass, if we really wanted a situation where the end products were recyclable, our civilisation would have chosen to keep the chemical composition of the stuff exactly the same – but we didn’t do that. If I was writing a school report on that subject, the grade would be F- with the mysterious comment, “Could do better”! 🙂
Cheers
Chris
Scotlyn @ #239: thank you for that link! I am a servant and devotee of Brigid as well, and while I will never be able to afford even the small version of that steel cros, it’s a lovely thing to see!
I was thinking about your comment on businesses not being able to afford to do business during decline. From what I see, it is hard, my eldest in rural OR is working very part time for a small business, a small locally owned, non corporate affiliated hardware/lumber store. The owner is hanging on by a thread, been in business for years, but just found a partner who has gone in on the business to share the financial load and Sure we’re all rooting for them….
Out here I wonder if we will soon enter the time where we cant pay what the various construction contractors think they need to charge to stay in business — although my latest quote may be a “go away ” price, and maybe it is not so bad for all of them. But will be. So I want it done NOW while it might be possible, not good to have leak in high wind driven storms, but cant at that price. I need one that doesnt have so much overhead and no employees. It is becoming clear to me that the companies with secretaries and various crews and so so many trucks and rented facility in town, that is just too much overhead for me to pay for. I just hired a local driveway mechanic to fix my little truck, cash, and still to me a high price, but it does take the State and County out of the loop of getting their cut ( sales tax) This mechanic works for a smog shop in town and then for himself on the side, he grew up here and has a decent rep, so lets hope for the best, my first time hiring him and it is all struts and shocks.
Speaking of sales taxes, I wonder when it will get to where U-Hauls come down from Oregon selling product out of the back of a truck. Currently sales tax is right under 10% ( total, city/county/state) and it is limited to 10% by state law. I believe I heard the state just raised that limit, leaving the cities and counties free to raise it more, to maybe 11.5 max ? What will it take to get the trucks from out of state > Certainly if it was 25%, but likely lower too, I dont know. The lenocratic solution to the high taxes is to use some of the high taxes to hire more PMC to run programs for free disposable diaper and period products ( which are taxed). To be equitable. I think some of the crunchy moms are still using cloth for both needs and washing them, my household did back in the day, which is much much cheaper and better for humans and the environment and dont take up landfill space which the state government wont approve any new landfills as everything must be recycled or composted, except they now subsidize disposable diapers and kids arent potty trained until kindergarten in many cases these days. There is no logical consistency.
I believe I read up thread, that fracking makes a high proportion of natural gas, so if we have lots of natural gas, why are we making people get an electric heat pump water heaters and space heating ? They are noisy and electricians are very expensive.
Hi John Michael,
I know man, and wish you the best. I’ll keep prodding you to get back into the fray.
I see that people are being outraged by the actions of ICE, but your country has a history of such acts. And if I may say so, your advice is spot on: if an officer has a weapon, it is a most unwise course of action to antagonise and/or alarm them, or be too vulnerable. May I remind those folks who are upset, to consider this example: Justine Damond Ruszczyk’s family wins record $US20 million payment over wrongful death. I’d imagine that if Justine could choose between life and $US20 million, well, it’s not a complicated story.
And! Agreed, electricity is useful, but extraordinarily wasteful. In fact, years ago some interweb troll got all high and mighty and started using words like err, ‘selfish’ and ‘wasteful’ to describe his thoughts to me about my going off grid. It was a real pleasure to point out how much electricity in the grid is lost between the generator and the device. It’s astounding really, and the muppets who suggest to electrify everything, have no idea as to the physical realities of any of this stuff. Truly I wonder what will happen to transformers on super hot days when more than a few households on a circuit begin charging vehicle batteries. Most devices tend to switch on and off, like an air conditioner compressor and give the transformers a break, but a car charger pulls at a constant high current. It’s nuts and most likely won’t end well.
Interestingly, the rural town a little bit to the north of this mountain range, has experienced a bit of population growth and I’ve heard stories from people living there about how the electricity system is becoming unreliable. So I reckon you are right about de-electrification of rural areas.
The other prediction I’ll make, without providing any timeline, is that rural roads will return to dirt, and the asphalt will be err, redistributed for city purposes. That stuff is readily recyclable. Crunch and transport is a comparatively cheap process. Already there are credible reports that infrastructure spend in the city per capita, exceeds the rural areas, in this state at least. But with the majority of the population living in the one big city, politically that turn of events, doesn’t matter. It’s when the outer urban areas receive the same short shrift that things will even out.
Oh, and batteries are a subsidy seeking item because otherwise they make little economic sense (from my perspective anyway): Battery installation rates collapse as ‘solar-coaster’ strikes back. I like that witty term: A solar-coaster! It’s good isn’t it?
Cheers
Chris
@ seeweedy
You could just get battery back up for the refrigerator if your current solar electric inverter is grid tie only and doesnt deal with batteries.
Bluetti is now making one that fits on top of the refrigerator. although if you have a separate freezer and other needs that wont be enough
I hear you on the lithium. You can still get Edison batteries, Nickel-Iron, and those last forever too. YOu can also still buy deep cycle lead acid batteries and these are easily dropped off to have the lead recycled, Trojan is a realy good brand, these last a long time if you dont cycle down often and keep the electrolytes topped off. I think since you have a grid only inverter that is why everyone wants to sell you a lithium battery with built in battery management. But, you could just change out your inverter to a solar-ark inverter that is not grid only. I have been told that if my 28 year old inverter dies I should buy that brand ( I have an old made in CA trace inverter). I am grid tied but have the kind of inverter that doesnt have to be and that handles batteries, I can use any type of the various batteries that I can make add up to 48Volts. I can use lead acid deep cycle batteries, salt water batteries, LiFePo, NiFe Edison batteries and dont need any with built in battery management that need internet access…. and you can still buy a regular inverter and so this.
Robert Mathiesen @ 272, you could write an exciting novel about your ancestor.
Anonymous @ 252, If I am right, Trump’s backers want Canadian resources, not Canadians. An example of that thinking is the laughable 51st. state notion. No effective representation in Congress (2 senators and a handful of representatives for a territory larger than the continental USA), state government far, far away–the big money boys and girls expect to be able to roll right in and do whatever they like, all the while explaining what a favor they are conferring on the benighted locals by “developing” hitherto unexploited territories. I do note that the PM, Carney, whatever his faults and failings, is himself an international banker and must therefore have his own allies among the billionaire class.
JMG @ 267, “the Iranian situation has shown that China’s open to backchannel diplomacy and deal-cutting on such issues;” China is open to back-channel deal cutting where it has no direct interests. I think Beijing would have two very strong interests in Canada, Arctic access, and land where Chinese can settle.
Daylight savings time year round
We tried this before in I think 1974, and I remember it. It was very very dark when I walked to school, this is not trivial. It was super dark, cold and not safe or comfortable. Beside the very real safety factors it is not good for our natural rythms as humans, especially young humans, to be up that long before sunrise.
When we changed to daylight savings time being more of the year, that first year we did it, we had a high school girl, I think Morgan Hill, she was snatched and abused and killed waiting for the school bus in the dark, it was right when we first did this early time change a few years ago, not in 1974. That man found this quite convenient to have it super dark when just he week before of course it was lighter while she waited.
I am afraid I have no sympathy to the whole recreation after work given the safety concerns for the school children and the getting them up so much more before dawn. For most USA children, the reality of having to go to school and the time it starts is not optional, whereas the whole sports and recreation is. I think that if people want this time after work that is light, they should just adjust their own personal work schedule, which many places of employment dont mind an hour earlier start and out. I used to do that just to carpool and just told my team that I was leaving at 4pm, and we needed to scheduale meetings in accordance. FOr those that dont work 9 to 5 office jobs, they already have issues due to shifting shift times that preclude such, so I wouldnt look for sympathy from them !
As we decline, we may go back to being more local, in other words, when I was a child, my parents were at work when I or siblings had afterschool sports and we made our own way or there was a bus or school bus. This all usually had to take place much more local, like at the school fields. ALso, as we decline, we wont be able to afford so much of the drivng the kids to school that takes place so often now, more kids will walk, more relocalization. It seems bad timing to presume more drivng and parental involvement.
Speaking of losing electricity, here in Australia people are being forcibly removed from the grid in very remote areas. The power company gives them solar panels, batteries and a generator, which is cheaper than keeping them on the grid but not as reliable:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-05/maintenance-issues-in-wa-standalone-power-systems/106807116
The future’s here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet. Though in Australia, our remote areas are REALLY remote, with a population of 25 million spread across an area the size of the lower 48 US states.
JMG, Anonymous (#254)
I think the peeling away by Carlson, Greene, and others who were loyal to Trump from 2015 until recently is significant. On the other hand, those who have religious faith in Israel’s cause and it being carried out in an Old Testament manner are also a significant force. And there are those who highly rate Trump’s culture war red meat.
Carlson has an established audience, Greene is good clickbait, and anyone supporting Israel devotedly enough has their voice amplified. This makes it difficult to determine how much any well-amplified voice represents the vast majority of folks who have no such megaphone. And of course, there are parts of Trump’s mass base (not the donors) that do not fit into my crude schema. So I can’t tell how much of his mass base he lost. It does seem to be a significant portion, especially since even his biggest winning margin, 2024, was smaller than Obama’s in 2008 and tiny compared to the 1932, 1936, 1964, 1972, 1980, or 1984 elections.
It is curious and a large weakness on the Democratic side that to this day, the Dem mass base by and large worships the ground Obama walks on. The refusal to acknowledge and try to fix the harms Obama and Bill Clinton did, particularly to the working class and lower middle class, greatly handicaps the Dems.
Mary Bennet, I am in the US most of the time and more familiar with US politics than European, but a good exposition. I do find that Europeans have a hard time grasping how much US elections are bought and paid for. The equivalent results are achieved in Europe in a more genteel and tasteful manner. Just as anti-democratic, but classier (in both sense of the term).
Anon, Russia’s just as overextended in Ukraine as the EU is. As for the Indians, they could, but they won’t. Their geopolitical strategy — a very clever and effective one — is to stay out of shooting wars outside their near abroad, maintain good relations with all sides of any such distant conflict, and pursue their own national interest with laser intensity throughout. (It’s the strategy the US used back before we got into the empire business.) If the US and Canada get into a war, New Delhi will step back, wait for the outcome, and then make arrangements with the victor.
Albert, those are also good examples!
Denizen, er, you may want to reread my response. I didn’t punt; I explained that predicting the popping of a bubble is beyond even the capacity of a genius like Isaac Newton, and so I wasn’t going to waste my time on any such foredoomed attempt. I also don’t claim to know the whole range of endogenous and exogenous factors driving this particular crash. My approach is that of morphology: I know what signals a bubble gives, no matter what drives it, and so don’t get bogged down in disagreements over this or that cause. In complex situations like this one, a morphological approach — no matter how unsatisfactory to those that prefer causative models — tends to yield more accurate predictions, and that’s what concerns me.
Atmospheric, many thanks for the data points. One factor you’ve already picked up on is that individual craftspeople with no overhead will be in business a lot longer than anybody else. As for why everybody’s being pushed into electric appliances, why, your phrase “no logical consistency” covers that, too. It’s quite remarkable how many people think that electrical appliances don’t pollute, and never ask themselves where the electricity comes from…
Chris, I think you’re quite correct about rural roads, and my guess is they’ll be returned to dirt about the same time that the power goes away permanently in any given area. A very long time ago, in one of my very first pieces of deindustrial fiction, I described the process as resembling moths getting at a blanket and eating it to bits, one hole at a time. I see no reason to revise that.
Mary, China has many more important interests, such as Taiwan. Nor is room for settlers a major issue now that China’s population is declining by 3 million or so a year.
Kfish, good gods. I didn’t think that this was happening yet. Thanks for the heads up!
Jessica, I’m no fan of Israel, but I recognize that the Jewish lobby in the US is a potent force in elections and reliably rallies around pro-Israel candidates. Trump doubtless has that in mind as well, and right now he has a very real chance of pulling the Jewish vote bloc away from the Democratic party, which has been its home for many decades now, and getting its support for the GOP. Losing the support of Carlson and Greene is small potatoes compared to the chance to turn New York into a red state — and at this point that’s not as out of reach as it doubtless sounds.
Typing
I did take a short summer course for a few weeks of typing in junior high, but after that I decided specifically to not take typing, I figured if I didnt know how I would not be pigeonholed into doing it for a living. So I intentionally did not learn much of it, and It turned out I was wrong to not take a course ( I managed to take a few shop classes and drafting in high school as well as cooking. it is a shame that high schools no longer offer such and instead insist on only AP academic courses, it is valuable to take electives) In college I paid a typing service to type up the term papers I had, and it was very reasonable and it does make you have to finish your papers ahead of time and have better time management, my major did not have such, but all the various other requirements did. Then, personal computers came out ! And less support personell at work so I did need to type after all and can do touch typing, just never as fast of course as my grandmothers did. The basics of touch typing from the weeks long summer course came back and when I mess up now as you all likely see it is usually due to things like my brain issues where I’ll use the position but ont eh other hand or hit the one next to the one I want or scramble the order a little.
“I believe I read up thread, that fracking makes a high proportion of natural gas, so if we have lots of natural gas, why are we making people get an electric heat pump water heaters and space heating ?”
Fear of CO2 emissions. The electric power is supposed to come from PV or wind, or here (Washington State) hydroelectric.
When the heat pump water heater has to get the heat from the rest of the house which is also heated with heat pump the efficiency goes down in a hurry. In the summer though it is a fine idea, move heat from the indoor air to the hot water tank. The problem in this house it the utility room is too small, I’d have to force ventilate the room for the notion to work.
By the way, natural gas is not available in my neighborhood so it’s either propane or electric and electric is still cheaper. This house was built all-electric from the beginning in 1957. A majority of the original baseboard heaters are still in service, two have burned out in the 25 years I’ve been here.
Anyone wishing to dive deeper into the question of Canadian-US relations might find The Penguin History of Canada by Robert Bothwell helpful. I have. It was recommended to me by Ian Welsh, who is an Ontarian.
My impression is that the anti-American streak in Ontario comes more from the American invasion of Ontario during the War of 1812. And it seems more a matter of identity than real substance. Similar to what Graeber calls schizmogenesis. (Neighboring cultures often define themselves in opposition to each other.)
I can say from personal experience that Alberta, even in Edmonton which is the left-wing part of Alberta, is more anti-Ottawa than anti-American. I have spent much less time in British Columbia but it seemed like they are more anti-Alberta than anything else.
I could easily see US-Canadian relations playing out in many different ways, from restored Canadian autonomy to Canadian breakup to the US swallowing Canada whole. However, the elite that runs Canada (Laurentian elite I have seen it called) is a comprador elite. Its power and identity come from its role as the local agents for the US-centric economic empire. It will play the anti-American card when it suits them, but when the master calls, they will sit at his feet and wag their tails. Also, I am not sure if “anti-Americanism” is the right term for speaking against an American president’s disrespect for Canada and threats to eliminate it as a country.
As resource depletion and the resulting decline continue, Canadian resources will be important. The energy return on energy investment (ERoEI) for Albertan tar sands is poor compared to Saudi oil (or Pennsylvania back in the day), but compared to getting it from under a mile of ocean or two miles of Greenland ice, it is quite good.
for Denison @ 276
“CNBC’s Jim Cramer said Wednesday that it’s time for companies to prove artificial intelligence is paying off.
“I need cold hard return facts,” the “Mad Money” host said. “Or, I, too, will grow more skeptical than I am now.”
The AI boom has fueled massive spending by technology companies, and there’s no end in sight. Analysts estimate total AI capital expenditures could climb above $1 trillion in 2027.”
“Cramer said one of his biggest concerns this earnings season is that companies adopting AI have largely failed to point to meaningful revenue gains or cost savings from the technology.”
People are getting nervous and that is a good sign that the bubble is beginning to quiver.
“https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/15/jim-cramer-needs-proof-ai-paying-off-.html”
Then there is this;
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemmagreen/2026/07/02/ai-costs-more-than-the-people-it-replaced/
You pay for the AI by the token (basically a syllable in your prompt, and possible the output too, I’m fuzzy on that.) There are news stories about runaway token costs at various companies. So if this turns out to be true the use case for AI will be a lot smaller than expected and the implosion will begin.
@ Michael Grey #100
Kwh a day
what do you cook with and do you have hot water ? Those are big electric users. Can you tell us how you are meeting your needs on 3kWh a day and how you would meet them if you needed to reduce to 1kWh/day ?
When the grid is down and stormy at the same time here ( so on batteries only) I can use 2kWh/day or less, but the refrigerator which is about the most energy conserving you can get here as a regular one sold in the regular stores uses is rated at 1kWh/day just for it. One LED light bulb at a time, a laptop and a cable modem box and handheld HAM radio for communications. I suppose the light and the communications could be done without…. On those less than 2kWh/day days, I do not have hot water heater or electric range when it is stormy and the grid is down. I always do without air conditioning and use a wood stove for all heat. ( it was 101 in the afternoon outside last wednesday and 85 or so inside dowstairs, upstairs hotter, so it does get hot here, not always that hot, but not unusual it is routine for some summer days, it was harder to get to sleep upstairs that night)
From what I have seen, the lowest power way to have refrigeration is to either convert or buy a small to modest sized chest freezer style refrigerator and not have a freezer. Living energy farms sells a chest style refrigerator (8cu ft, $1200) that can hook directly to a solar panel without needing any intermediation like a charge controller or a battery. That leaves only needing the smallest amount of battery for some lighting and communications after dark. Or, if you have a car, to charge a cell phone off of its battery and just not have evening light excepting a candle or such.
I like having a stereo and my range to do more complicated cooking and canning in the winter. But, I dont have to so that if the power is not available.
I think you are right to learn to do with less, to explore how now.
“Jessica, I’m no fan of Israel, but I recognize that the Jewish lobby in the US is a potent force in elections and reliably rallies around pro-Israel candidates. Trump doubtless has that in mind as well, and right now he has a very real chance of pulling the Jewish vote bloc away from the Democratic party, which has been its home for many decades now, and getting its support for the GOP.”
Much of the Zionist Jewish vote migrated to the Republicans already and a good part of the Jewish vote still with the Dems is appalled by what Israel is doing. Electorally, a pro-Israel stance does more to secure the Christian Zionist vote, which is much larger than the entire Jewish vote. Then again, the Christian Zionist vote is as reliably Republican as it gets.
So Trump’s support for Israel (the same as every president since at least Nixon) seems more about his donors than about voters.
The shift toward the Republicans in New York and New Jersey in 2024 was strongest among groups classified as People of Color who don’t want to be part of a Black-led bloc and young men sick of HR ladies (in the broadest sense).
I enjoy the back and forth on this blog and the civility. I have long tried to tap into sources from many different viewpoints but have found it necessary to stick to the ones that are civil. My first foray into the right-wing was Red State News, but its comment section was simply vile and information free. Tucker Carlson is easier to listen to than many folks whose politics I agree with more. I also followed Charlie Kirk and was sad that he was killed (whoever did it).
Here, I get one-stop shopping, with lots of different views, usually expressed in a way that lets me know how someone arrived at supporting their views. I bet you have never been compared with Amazon before. 🙂
BTW, I don’t think that the US elites will ever resolve their differences and find unity until the basic structure of the US changes. As the US is shaped now, the elites have no purpose other than staying in power and that lack is demoralizing. The US elites fragmented into shards long ago (during The Sixties basically). None of the shards looks out much for the interests of the elites as a whole. It is no longer possible to have the kind of elite discipline it took for FDR to force reluctant parts of the elites into backing the New Deal for their own good.
Elite unity will only be accomplished when the basic structure of the US changes (from post-industrial de-industrial finance centered to post-industrial-age production centered). Making that change, whatever shape it takes, will involve sweeping away much of the current elites and wrenching cultural change. The only force at this point that is strong enough to even take a shot at this is Christian nationalism, but for various reasons, I don’t think they will even try and if they try, they will fail disastrously. Though such a failed attempt might pave the way for something that actually works.
My, I am such the prophet today. 🙂
Of course, only time will tell.
@ David, Life expectancy USA vs UK/Canada Latitude, elevation etc….
Could just be latitude an dhow it is measured. Latitude statistically makes a difference even within the USA with the northern states having longer life expectancy than the southern states.
In Europe, the most Northern Countries have a better life expectancy than southern Europe. Now, I am only comparing areas that have similar resources, you cant do the comparison with countries that have no budget for ehalthcare.
Within the USA we also see differnces due to elevation, which may correlate to pollution burden. Stuff goes downhill and downstream.
Then there are some known differences in teh USA, we actually have poorer outcomes for babies than other first world countries but better access to heroic procedures. But, at least we dont have MAID like Canada, how does Canada put that into their statistics ?
Aldarion (#250)
I think that is exactly the case. We have never seen the decline of a society primarily of wage workers. The only comparable in that sense would be the Soviet Union, but for all its faults, communism provided much broad support after its collapse than the US has now, for example housing and heating all but free.
From what I have read, no one seems to doubt that the US could seize any part of Canada it wants. The question is whether it could hold it and that would depend on how the ordinary Canadian responds. The smarter way for the US would be to reduce the Canadian economy to such shambles that annexation felt like rescue. That was the case when Germany annexed Austria in 1938, though rump Austria had only 2 decades of history then as an independent country.
Thinking about what could be parallels to the Great depression that we are seeing.
Where I live the trends are obscured and we are in bubble territory for many things. But, atm 2 of my offspring live in Oregon, and not by Portland. The Oregon equivalent of flyover country. I talk to them and have visited many times. It is very different than here. Many examples. We dont even have discount food shopping in this county, it is a big deal there ( yes, Walmart, WinCo but also local institutions ( Sherms, Bi-Mart)). They have people also hunting and fishing to provide food. Their charter school, has many to most kids eating the free school lunch and wearing Walmart clothes, this is not looked down upon, it is typical. They dont have surplus to have things like free spay and neuter clinics for pets, and many people cannot afford the heroic care for their beloved pets that people do here. Many people do not even go as far as Portland, the big city let alone further travel. It is expensive and 4 hours away. Of course, they have retirees buying there who are in a very different background than typical for the longer term residents, including retirees coming from California and Portland. Hard to explain, but life is harder – not exactly harder, maybe just closer to teh bone, for basic needs there and there is not the excess to “trickle down” as it were to make life easier for the less well off that there is here, in monied areas like the greater SF Bay area. My middleclass for there offspring, when comes down here is poor. Same thing happens when that one goes to family in Portland. That more rural area does not have the same expectations or way of day to day living. Everything here or Portland seems so extravagant and wasteful in comparison. The consumption. The amount of fru-fru things to buy and eat, they do have a few home based business bakers, we go as far as the $10 bespoke corn tortillas and locallycsprouted nut flour. The amount of pocket money that flows thru the local middle class fingers. Middles class there means you can own a home and have clean walmart clothes and shoes on the kids and enough at least semiwell balanced foods and are not so financially strained that you can give mental space and gas money to go to the free library program for the kids and the park.
JMG,
Thank you.
Could you please elaborate on the difference between a morphological and a causative approach? Is the analysis of markets in terms of their fractal mathematics an example of a morphological approach? Could you describe the contours of the larger morphology you discern in the current bubble that encompasses both of what I have termed factors endogenous to the market, and what I have termed factors exogenous to the market? Would you say that the causative approach is epistemologically preferable in principle, but that, in practice, it merely yields more confusion and mistakes than the morphological approach?
I agree with previous comentator on rebuilding after disaster. His area with tornado, in my area it was fire.
It has been 6 years, we have many lots not being rebuilt in the county, but this does vary by area. In my neighborhood we have many not replaced in kind, there are now 5 manufactured homes, we had none before, we have 4 lots with people living rough, trailers with sheds or a yurt and by trailers I mean small travel trailer, the trailers must build soon or out, 2 very small houses built, 7 nice to very nice homes rebuilt, 3 left vacant, and one being used as a summer place only with 3 tiny homes on wheels. Anyways, I would say a downgrade overall in quality of housing even if not in pricing. Not the resources to rebuild in kind in some cases. I would have been in deep trouble if mine would have gone, even though I still have insurance. I agree that insurance is dropped by the elderly when they just cant afford it anymore. I am not there yet. but it is a possible outcome in the future, it takes a very large bite.
@Denizen
I’ll give it a go, if you don’t mind, I think there will be an attempt at the end of August, there was a correction again a few years ago when Deepseek entered the scene. There are a lot of claims that China tries to pop it August.
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/chinese-hedge-funds-warn-ai-091421732.html?guccounter=1
My guess is that if US know there will be some movements out of China they can ballance it, stop it.
Maybe this is will be this year’s August surprise, but I think it won’t happen in August, although there is a chance that it will too. After August if it manages, there will be again a small rally and I think it the final pop will happen after Christmas 2026 or early January 2027.
@ JMG
That is what I told my kids this week visiting from Oregon, that food is cheaper now than when I was a kid as proportion of income. But it is bought after the set bills are paid, such as housing and power bill, both which are much higher as a percentage of income. So then you have what is left after paying the bills and you need to buy food and gas for the car. Gas for the car is also much higher percentage of income as it is energy like the power bill. Water bill is alot higher percentage too, but a water bill is energy to pump water and peoples salaries to maintain the enterprise, so it is energy again.
So, the way it feels is real, you go to buy food and it is expensive vs what you have left, what room in the budget is there. But as a percentage of income, it is lower, it used to be closer to monthly rent to buy food for a low income household. Leaving the other 1/3rd of income to pay for transportation, heat, spending.
Doesnt make it easier to get the groceries
Jessica#286
According with my experience, in Spain the voted are not really counted. And I can asure that in the rest of western european countries -except UK-:is not happening the same
Jessica # 224:
“Campaigning on no wars, then launching the war on Iran is more than not living up to the expectations people projected onto him. It is a betrayal of his base.”
Maybe I’m too cynical, but I think he’s a politician too, like the non Trumpian ones, so he isn’t compelled to fulfill every promise he told to the people in elections, by any written law. It’s a blind spot in every modern democracy, methink.
By the way, my loved and hated alike geopolitical thinker, Col. Pedro Baños, wrote in a book published five years ago (“El dominio mental”), that Trump wasn’t as bad as he was portrayed by (liberal) MSM, because he hadn’t started any war…yet; praising him (cough). I bet Mr. Baños has regretted that phrase nowadays…
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J.L.Mc12 # 227:
“Something I’ve previously wondered about as a substitute for modern power drills is a bicycle-powered flywheel that transmits torque to handheld drills via a flexible cable drive, “flex-shafts””
It seems a good idea, according my love for bicycles, and how many people pay for going to a gym and sweating in the spinning bikes to burn calories…Well, that bike-powered flywheel could be a clever way to burn calories for doing a mechanical work in the future.
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Aldarion # 242:
I’m a dilettante about batteries topic, but I grasp lithium can be recycled like another metals: good news. Bad news: recycling never is perfect, so a more or less small part of metal will never be used again in next use cycle (it’s the dirty secret of recycling).
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Justin P. # 245:
thanks for your comment about your own family context. Indeed, co-dependency is a risk within families. I agree. I’m glad your family have worked in such a civilized way. Mine has helped its members always too, when we deserved it.
I think helping is a duty within a family, but there are limits. I remember know I met a guy who always was complaining about his mother, because she was a bad and money-grubbing woman. Some time after this talk with him, I met his mum, she told me (with hard evidences)that his son was a gambler addict who wasted every money she gave him (ahem). Sometimes love means to say “No” when it’s necessary…
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Mary B.# 251:
“Mme. Clinton, Herself, the female (I refuse to call her a lady) who, like essence of skunk, just does not go away, has decided that 2028 just might be Her Year.”
OMG! Redoubling in the mistake…Good news for Republican supporters and their high spheres, methink.
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The Arcane # 258:
Of course, there are some surprises for new oil wells in that zone, but one of the teachings of old school peak oilers was that likely new reserves in this or that country are hopes more than evidences. And hypothetic reserves can be bloated for inner propaganda motives and geopolitical agendas. I don’t have any special Russophobia, but I can’t believe blindly in Orlov and another Russian nationalists about their claims about their country great oil hope…except if they show us hard evidences of it.
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(To be continued)
Jessica#286 Correction of my anterior coment. I guess that the voted are not counted in all Western Europe ,excepto UK.
Siliconguy # 259 and others:
“a temporary gathering of people for the purpose of doing a specific farm task.””
You’ve depicted a common work by some people who gathers for a while, well, it’s to some extent similar with a common work in old times in the countryside here (in some areas of Spain).
It was called “trabajar a zofra”. “Zofra” is an Arab origin word who means to work in common for free, for a shared benefit. However, it seems its use was wider than helping in a farm, because in old times, people in the countryside here used that expression for common works within a group of farmers or a small village. For example, cutting back tall grass and weeds along a irrigation canal without being paid, because the profit was for everybody.
It seems it’s a custom inherited from medieval times, which nowadays is near forgotten.
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JMG # 267:
“The second is that Europe is catastrophically overextended in Ukraine right now, and the only support it could offer Canada in such a scenario is verbal.”
I’m afraid you’re right. Ukraine is indeed a “grave” for EU money and weaponry,so…please Canuck elites, be less arrogant with your neighbor.
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JMG # 287:
“Russia’s just as overextended in Ukraine as the EU is.”
Yes, and in addition to the fact that Russia is very busy in Ukraine, it’s very likely the Kremlin is also busy helping Iran with weapons and another measures, like China is probably doing now.
Carlos (#134) That “Health Exec News” web site is just full of tales of the medical-industrial complex behaving badly, and it’s not as if this was some fringe outlet for patient complaints (ahem), but HEALTH EXEC NEWS. This is like a trade magazine for the people who are running medical businesses, and they’re finding out that not all new ideas are good ones.
All – It’s difficult to compare current conditions with those of the Great Depression. One factor is that, in the 1930s, many people could return to their family farms when life in the city got rough, where they could eke out a subsistence, even without much cash flow. Another factor is that, in the 1930s, we didn’t have government cash assistance: people who were standing in line at a soup kitchen then are the same people in line at the grocery store with a government-funded payment card. They’re much less visible, today. A third factor (probably) is that some of the Tales of the Great Depression were written by people who had it especially rough: “Daddy lost his job, and had only enough money for alcohol…” so our collective memories may not be a fair representation of the average experience.
Northwinds (#126) re: cottage/village industry. Most of the stuff we spend money on these days is stuff that can only be produced by massive industrial supply chains. It may have been possible to make a useful shoe from locally-sourced leather a thousand years ago, but no one’s going to make a modern basketball shoe. An oil lamp, yes. An LED lamp, no way! A one-page weekly newspaper about local events? Maybe. A web site of world news? No way. An optical telegraph (which only works on sunny days, and with continuous human operation on both ends), yes. A mobile phone, no. Cabbage, yes. Bananas, no. Cottage industry might create woolen clothing, cabbages, bread, and beer, but these are a minuscule fraction of what we currently spend money on: energy, distantly-sourced and prepared food, cars/trucks, various forms of insurance (home, auto, health).
The transition back to local production will indeed be wrenching.
TylerA: Thanks for clarifying for me the distinction between LLM and neural net. I just found this: https://www.neuralconcept.com/post/ml-vs-llm-key-differences-applications-engineering-impact
It’s on my “too do” list to learn enough linear/tensor algebra so I can use and at least half-appreciate GR and ML. We shall see if I can get the other areas of my life running well enough that I can better focus on that.
I only bought my Tesla in February, so I can’t speak directly to how FSD *was* in 2024, but my friend has an older Tesla and he said the experience is vastly improved. I think there are remnants of how it used to be (half-assed) in how the Tesla still kind of bumbles at the beginning and the end of the trip, and particularly in street parking, and seems incapable (so far) of learning, no matter how many times it is corrected.
Let me explain. On public streets the FSD is generally *far* better at making salfe driving decisions than I am. Some times I overrule it because I see an opening or an upcoming blockage before it does, but generally not — and pretty much always it is super safe and more than good enough.
But when I go on a private road, or on private property (such as the entrance to my property, or in a commercial parking paved area behind a warehouse) it is INCAPABLE of learning anything. It keeps trying to go the wrong way even after being corrected 20, 30, 100 times that it is going in a wrong direction, or that it is going to miss a turn, or it should park *here* — not there. So, I imagine that is how FSD *used* to be and if *that* is even half correct, it *used* to be very, stubbornly dumb.
I understand Karpathy was responsible for the leap forward in accurate *public* driving, but now he is gone to Anthropic. (https://cleantechnica.com/2026/05/19/teslas-former-ai-lead-goes-to-anthropic/)
JMG (#139) Re: Repairs. Greenbelt, Maryland, has a thriving tool lending library and monthly Repair Cafe. Between 10AM and noon, anyone can bring anything broken to the Tool Library, and someone will (attempt to) repair it. The main idea is to keep junk out of the waste stream and keep cash in the pocket, but it also provides a social venue and environment for transfer of skills. The clients are welcome (encouraged) to watch and learn from a fixer.
Yesterday was one such clinic, and I had four projects to work on. One was a pair of headphones where the wires had somehow been yanked off of the speaker. I had no trouble soldering them back on, but is the average home equipped with a fine-tipped soldering iron, solder-removal braid, solder, flux, and magnifying lamp?
Another project was a “air purifying machine” that just stopped working. After I just checked out all relevant switches, it started to work. I don’t know why.
Another project was a hand-held cordless vacuum cleaner. Apparently, it was supposed to be used with some kind of filter that was missing, because the entire blower/motor housing was stuffed with dust and hair, which I extracted with a dental pick and pliers. It was a slow, tedious process, but the owner and I had a conversation that we never would have had otherwise.
The fourth project was a food processor, and I couldn’t get it apart to investigate the failure. Obviously, it was not designed for maintenance or repair. (The client was going to take it back to the store with a complaint.)
These kinds of repairs would not make “economic sense” as a small business with rent to pay, and any non-zero hourly labor rate to charge. They’d probably need liability insurance, too. But as a vehicle for retired guys to swap tools, techniques, and tales, and for neighbors to get stuff working again, it’s great.
Tesla recycles its battery packs at the Nevada Gigafactory.
“None of our scrapped lithium-ion batteries go to landfilling, and 100% are recycled.”
https://www.tesla.com/support/sustainability-recycling
Atmospheric River #284: People are either early risers or night owls, and I think that VERY strongly shows up in strong preferences on where they want more daylight hours. It used to be that a lot more people lived on a farm, had cows to milk in the morning, and had to walk to school. Over the last hundred years there has obviously been a huge movement toward living in a city, having lots of artificial electric light, and wanting to spend time *after* work socializing with friends and family or even “partying”. And then there are people who have significant “seasonal affective disorder” who really get messed up on standard time.
Anyway, I am personally DELIGHTED to have more time in the evening and can much better cope with it being dark at 7 AM than dark at 4 PM. And I think you “lose” this particular vote. I’m not saying you are “wrong” in your preference . . . only that your preference is not in line with the trend of the last century; you will doubtless get your preference, again, in the de-industrial future.
Jessica #222: :I am sure that you are aware of an alternative explanation for profits and have rejected it, but it does seem worth mentioning it in the discussion.”
Marxism is a “theory” in the way a “flat earth” is a theory. The heart of Marx’s “insight” is that a donkey is what creates value on a farm or a human project. That really is the whole of his core “insight” if you bother to look it up: that original ideas, management, skillful risk taking, and intelligence in general do NOT create wealth; that all the wealth is created by the animals who do the physical labor.
Was there ever a more self-evidently dumb idea adopted more broadly in all of human history? And Marxism s not even a “theory” anymore, as had been tried thousands of times over the last century or so and its long-term “outcome” is ALWAYS a declining standard of living . . . strangling of individual choice . . . and, when followed a little further the butchery of millions of people and the further immiseration of most of the 99%. But it is really good for the 1%, and the lazy, and the dim witted and ignorant keep going for it under various names.
I’m not much of a fan of Corporatism pretending to be free-market Capitalism, but “Socialism” is a dead horse which keeps being brought back into the race as a system for humans, for the future. Marxism works well for ants and bees. But Marxism is a profoundly dumb idea, self-evidently a non-starter for humans. And I have to wonder who I am looking at when I hear someone propose it as a “theory”?
Martin Armstrong is brave enough to put a date on his predictions. He says he can do this because everything runs in cycles and his Socrates AI is fed all the relevant data and has made predictions that were accurate in some cases to the very day.
Well, maybe. Anyway, the next Big Crunch according to Socrates will occur in 1932.
“We see tensions rising and we are looking at a Sovereign Debt Crisis even in the Middle East and Iran has shut down the Strait of Hormuz. We also see a serious debt crisis in Europe and all of this is coming to a head economically into 2032. So is this Armageddon? The computer does NOT show that this is the end of the world. However, we are looking for the power shift from the West to China.” — https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/armstrongeconomics101/ecm-armstrongeconomics101/is-this-the-end-of-the-world/
Roldy- #178: Re: diesel-electric locomotives. Electric motors are used in locomotives for a couple of reasons. One is that they provide good torque at low speeds, needed to get the train moving in the first place. Imagine the kind of clutch that would be needed (if you’ve ever driven a manual transmission, you’ll understand the careful control of friction needed to get a car moving from a dead stop on a rising slope). Another factor is that electric motors can be used for braking on long down-slopes. The potential energy of the whole train has to be dissipated as heat, somewhere, and locomotive have enormous air-cooled resistor banks to do this. The kind of brakes that cars have would be destroyed by the heat, and the air-compression “Jake brakes” that big trucks use wouldn’t be enough, either. Finally, the transmission path from the generator to the motors in a train is very short, and heavy conductors can be used to minimize the losses.
And, yes, belt-drive mechanisms can be inefficient. But that’s just one mechanism for direct mechanical conversion; others are much more efficient. That’s why my hybrid car has a direct engine-to-wheels transmission mode, for high-speed driving. For low speed, the engine charges the battery, the battery drives the motor that drives the wheels, and I get good low-speed torque.
From the American point of view, where did the current Canada/US tensions come from? I remember out of the blue hearing about all the ’51st state’ talk but I don’t understand why this happened or what led to it, in terms of the root motivations for it.
For what it’s worth, this Canadian hopes the enmity can be avoided.
I recall in that well-known Limits to Growth chart that there is a line for ‘pollution’, which lags behind population growth and industrial output. All the effort the Canadian government is now putting on expanding oil pipelines in the interest of national independence shows me how this can play out in practice. In my own province, fracking and deep sea drilling for oil is now politically full-steam ahead for the same reasons. I can understand where this support comes from in a sense, it’s logical to want more national self-sufficiency.
But, it seems many Canadians, partly due to the fear of conflict, will quietly approve of these measures. To paraphrase Jung: “A person will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing the loss of their own status”. I’d be lying if I didn’t notice this in myself – I can sense the pull – which is something I am working on. Because of the fear of what people perceive (emphasis on perceive) as threats to their survival, they will support these types of policies, and those things measured by that pollution curve will increase, as will resulting events such as all the wildfires.
My wife wisely pointed out when we chatted about this that Canadians, by these measures, will also ‘own’ the sources of pollution which are often offset to other countries.
@ Candy #124
I say to people all the time, if you want to know what is going on in the government and politics, read The Godfather by Mario Puzo. Don’t watch the movie, which leaves out all the parts that explain the WHY. Read the book. Right away you will understand why people want a Godfather. The very poignant example, right at the beginning of the book, is the undertaker asking the Godfather for justice for his daughter, who was badly beaten by two well connected young college boys because she refused to put out. The American justice system let the college boys off because they were well connected and had rich parents (which in the USA, means laws don’t apply). What the movie leaves out is that the Godfather makes sure the two upper class college boys are beaten to a pulp, but not outright killed; the Godfather’s thugs doing the beating were told, “If either of those two guys gets out of the hospital in less than two months, you guys are going back to driving the trucks,” that is to say, they would not advance in the mob hierarchy. This was meant to be, and was, a completely satisfying moment in the book. Every hit with the brass knuckles made it clear that if both those guys didn’t end up in wheelchairs for the rest of their lives, it would be a miracle. The girl got justice. The two snotty upper class college boys who thought they could rape a lower class girl with impunity got theirs. It perfectly defined why the Italian community felt they needed a mob boss. Justice could be found nowhere else.
In a wholly corrupt system, you have to have YOUR mob boss looking out for you. Everyone, consciously or not, understands that the world we live in is wholly corrupt, especially the legal system. That is what makes a mob boss attractive. Sure, he’s corrupt, but no more than any or the other mob families (including the government), and he is ours, i.e., he is looking out for our interests. That is where we are in the USA today and that is why Donald Trump got elected. That said, Trump is no Don Corleone — for better or worse. Note, I would rather have a functioning legal system and government. But that is not what we have…
JMG,
A thought for your consideration: today’s struggles in Russia, Venezuela and Iran, are a direct result of the decline of cheap oil. US fracking is the only way current world demand can be met. But it is wildly more expensive to produce. Therefore, cheaper oil must be kept off the market to keep prices high enough to keep fracking profitable enough so that world demand can be met. More frightening for some is that oil demand is leveling off and will begin declining, because China did figure out how to make batteries cost competitive with ICE. That means countries with cheap oil face the real threat of their oil being stranded and never bringing them the wealth it might otherwise have brought. These two issues will define the next couple of decades in the long descent.
Regarding the dust-up over whether Ms Good’s death was “suicide by cop” or “murder” – the scenario itself still nags at my brain.
Not the politics… the physics.
The thing is that if someone has aimed a car at a person armed only with a gun, is there any *physically* accurate scenario in which shooting the gun stops the car? I mean, if one shoots the car, it is still a large, heavy object with enormous momentum coming towards you, and if one shoots the driver, there is still a large, heavy object with enormous momentum coming towards you.
How DOES a man with a gun actually hope to stop a car which (whether maliciously or inadvertently) has been aimed at him?
JMG, you have written that so many cans have been kicked down the road in order to keep business as usual on track, that it has become difficult to estimate how things will develop. But the keeping up of appearances at all costs must surely have its price; am I right there? Arnold Toynbee discussed among other things how civilizations decline in a way where stair-step routs are following by new rallyings; am I right to assume that the current attempt to keep things up will have as a price a steeper stair-step down at a later time, since the resource base and the netto energy budget are nevertheless shrinking.
Dear Mr Greer
I apologise for bringing some Crude expressions into this discussion of peak oil but I think it was Fracking that Fracked up the predictions you made in 2006. I followed peak oil pretty closely from 2008 onwards and the peak oilers like Colin Campbell correctly predicted that conventional oil would peak around 2005 to 2015 and may continue on a plateau for some years after that until it started to decline. The peak oilers weren’t thick, they knew that the increased oil prices that accompanied the peaking of conventional oil would lead to an increase in the production of unconventional oils like tar sands which would help to cover the shortfall in conventional production for a few years.
However, what no one predicted was the sheer scale of the increase in light shale oil production. I remember looking through David Strahan’s the last oil shock and looking at the graph of oil production in the USA. The curve of oil production in the US followed a Hubbert curve fairly closely. It went up to about 10 million barrels a day when it peaked in about 1972 and then fell to about 5 or 6 million barrels by 2006. This wasn’t a smooth fall as there was a second rise in oil production after1979 when the north slope of Alaska came on line, but it never reached the level it achieved back in 1972 and soon went into decline again. I was looking at that curve and thinking that US oil production would increase as the oil price went up. But the one thing I was absolutely sure of was that oil production in the US would never reach the level it reached in 1972.. There was no way that could happen.
I was of course wrong, fracking increased oil production up to about 12 million barrels a day. You have to give it to the frackers, what they did was spectacular and as far as the main stream were concerned it killed off the whole narrative of peak oil. What they fail to take into account is that there is a strong element of showmanship in fracking light shale oil. For starters it is expensive and has a low EROI. If is also a light form of oil and to use it they have mix it with other heavier oil. But the thing that is really going to frack up fracking is its very high depletion rates. From what I remember most of the shale plays are in decline. Therefore the predictions of the peak oilers may only be delayed by a decade by fracking.
No country does show business better than America and the fracking boom has been a great show. Unfortunately this show isn’t going to be a comedy or a musical, its going to be a tragedy. The energy that came from fracking could have been used to cushion America’s descent down the reverse slope of Hubberts curve. It could have helped to build things like a passenger rail network. Instead it has been used to prop up the myth of progress so we can continue to do the same stupid things with oil we’ve been doing for the last hundred
Years.
The next show boat after shale oil is AI. At least shale oil was a real showboat that for all its failings provided energy for the economy. AI is a digital hologram of a show boat using images of entertainers who died years ago. Its just a mirage that will lead us across the desert where we die of thirst.
By the way I will put my language through the refinery so that I can come up with some more refined expressions next time I comment on this blog.
Jasmine
JMG,
One of the places that declining growth ( plus inflation) is playing out in the elimination of profit in business, is in the restaurant industry. Back in the early 2010’s new restaurants were starting and succeeding in Portland at a rapid pace. The most successful ones would expand to multiple outlets to multiply the profit potential for the chef, or restaurant group that owned them.
Then in the late 2010’s ( 2018 or so before covid) this changed and the new expansion outlets closed first, followed by the flagship location. Then of course the pandemic came along and finished off the ones that remained.
Now we see national chain restaurants closing down at all ends of the price spectrum. There are many reasons for this but underlying it all, is that with current costs ( labor, rent, food) there is no longer the ability to make profit in the industry.
The only exception is where the restaurant is small enough, with cheap enough overhead that it can be completely operated by the owner and their family. In most places this means food truck, explaining the rapid growth in this section of the restaurant business. So these food trucks are not being operated as profit making business’s but as wage generation opportunities for the owner and their family.
Frictionshift 186
On the gritty suth amurican ribber, I read the first few pages of the Doctorow’s book “Enshittification” (it has two Ts).
We live in the ENS***TOCENE AGE. I love it.
JMG, the word “s***” is legitimized. May I write, here, all four letters from now on?
I may get this book used.
💨💻💩💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
food prices processed vs not
Yes, unprocessed is cheaper than processed. But, many families were already cooking and buying unprocessed, so now when potatoes beans and onions are double the cost they were a short while ago, the effect on the food budget is noticed !
It is kind of like that thing the government did ( still does ? ) where they fudget eh food inflation numbers by saying that people can substitute this other less expensive alternative, so hamburger instead of steak. The thing is they, the economicists, are still claiming this ! We ran out of ways to downsize that piece of meat years ago steak-> hamburger->turkey burger->canned beans->dry beans the ones setting those budgets and inflation numbers are clearly out of touch.
I have dabbled in helping in the food insecurity area locally so have looked into things, if you take the US government thrifty food plan ( what the food stamp amount is based on) They calculate a sample diet and then go and price it out, no processed foods in that. When I take that list locally to Safeway, well there is no way one can buy that list of foods at those prices. Now, I do think that I personally could eat on that amount a month, but could not buy those items that they deem needed for a balanced diet. Maybe some other areas of the country those items can be bought. But, it is also they might price milk, for one example, at the cheapest price, a gallon at maybe walmart, whereas a household of one needs to buy a smaller more expensive container ( or in my case, freeze it in glass jars) and doesnt have access to stores that cheap.
Locally we decided many years ago that broke people were not eating enough fruits and vegetables so the priority came to emphasize those items for all of our significant amount of local giveaways. While it is true that if you have limited money you are going to buy the calorie/energy foods as that is logical, so at first of course, what a boon, now fresh vegetables. So the distribution most local to me we used to have produce from a farmers market left overs and distribute it next day. Fine for a few years, then they had a small area of shelf stable from the local food bank, for those that strapped. Which turned into alot of people were that strapped to today where it is a full variety of foods. This of course is subsidizing households whose rent is too high as most cannot qualify for food stamps, people can easily have most of their income going to housing and transportation and utilities. My thoughts for a while now have been, what is next ? If some people are getting what food they can this way, so they have already now cut that budget item down, what can there possibly be left that can be cut ? I suppose transport so cant get to the food line ? For housebound seniors we locally thru another program can drop off 5 frozen microwavable meals, and now added with it a …bag of produce.
Produce is good, it is nice, but it does not provide the calories needed on its own. And, people can meet their nutrient needs and still be calorie deficient, beans rice and produce will meet nutritional needs mostly but not have enough fat. I believe the local food bank aims to give away at least 50% fresh food, produce.
@Jasmine #320
Great comment, kudos,
Fracking fields have double digits declines per year, some are completely gone after just 3 years. Some traditional fields give something even after 20-30 years.
Funny enough is that what really revived machine learning and have it a bit of reputation as a serious money making enterprise was finding sweet spots in fracking fields, there’s at least 10 years of history of that,
https://doi.org/10.2118/223620-PA
To an extent is ironic, that shale fracking might have passed the baton to this AI craze.
Might be poetic justice, I said continuously for the last 2 years to me it looks like LLM looks like fracking technology and is just fracking the Internet. And the fields will be ruined after this. The Chatbots already ruined Stackoverflow question and answers site, a lot of open source project, and pretty much every forum on internet is full of slop now.
Jessica, ah, but the comprador class that runs Canada has been trying to switch its allegiance from the US to the EU. That’s one of the core factors behind the current mess. With regard to the current elite crisis here in the US, no argument there, but I don’t see Christian nationalism as an independent political force — it’s simply the default setting of most Americans in flyover country. My take, rather, is that the rising entrepreneurial elite will become the new dominant as the elite replacement cycle now under way runs its course, and elite discipline will be reestablished then, in much the same way that the elite replacement cycle of the 1930s made it possible for FDR to use the new managerial state to impose discipline on the older elite classes of his time.
Atmospheric, thanks for the data points!
Denizen, I should think that it’s self-explanatory. A causative approach attempts to identify factors causing an phenomenon. A morphological approach focuses instead on the morphology, that is, identifiable patterns that predict future outcomes irrespective of causes. In the case of a stock market bubble and bust, for example, a causative approach tries to figure out why stock prices are rising and what will cause the rising trend to give way; a morphological approach instead focuses on those telltale signs that identify a bubble as a bubble, and uses the appearance of those signs to predict the inevitable bust. (Again, Galbraith’s book is a fine introduction to those signs; it’s a source of great amusement to me that some of them are so very specific — for example, any time people justify rapidly rising stock prices by claiming that new technology has changed everything and the rules of the past don’t apply, it’s time to head for the exits.)
As for one or the other approach being preferable in principle, I can think of few arguments more useless. In the real world, every phenomenon is caused by an immense number of causes interacting in an even vaster number of ways; in some cases, those analyzable by the hard sciences, it’s possible to ignore all but a few causes and come up with a model that more or less imitates reality, but economics is not one of those fields. Any attempt to apply causative models to economic behavior is foredoomed to failure: as Galbraith wryly noted, the only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable. Morphology is the only viable option we’ve got in modeling complex phenomena.
Atmospheric, exactly. Everything has gone up in price — food’s the thing the media wants to talk about, since talking about the crazed inflation of housing prices might threaten the real estate bubble that props up our banking system.
Lathechuck, that’s an excellent example of the kind of noncash economic activity that becomes central in contracting societies — specifically, it’s a form of the gift economy, which becomes a dominant economic process in most local-scale economies. Call it a technological potlatch if you like. 😉
Gnat (if I may), you’ll never convince a Marxist that way. It’s crucial to realize that Marxism is a secular religion masquerading as a rational ideology; people who believe in it see themselves as missionaries of the capital-t Truth, standing up for the right side of history, doing battle for the glorious Communist future that’s their exact equivalent of the New Jerusalem descending from the clouds in glory. The mere fact that Marxian socialism has failed whenever it’s been tried has no more effect on their faith than the last two thousand years of divine no-shows dents the faith of Christians in the imminence of the Second Coming.
Jbucks, that’s a good question. It’s not something I followed early on. Anyone else?
Jon, that’s an analysis worth considering. We’ll see how it plays out!
Booklover, of course. In fact the reason for the stairstep process is precisely that governments and elites try to maintain business as usual past its pull date, turning what might otherwise be a relatively smooth slope into periods of stagnation interspersed with crisis.
Jasmine, that’s pretty much exactly my view of the situation. What I didn’t expect was that oceans of cheap credit would be manufactured from thin air in order to prop up the fracking industry for political reasons. As for the AI boondoggle, we’re getting the kind of triumphalist rhetoric that a truly crazed speculative bubble always generates — and when it pops, the shale will really hit the fan.
Clay, thank you for this. That’s an excellent example.
Northwind, no, you may not. I have to draw the line somewhere. “Shale,” by the way, is the acceptable euphemism here.
@ Scotlyn
Physics of stopping being hit by the car
The safest thing to do is to shoot befor eht car starts moving, so once they stop following directions and start the car up. If the car is facing or mostly facing the officer and she starts the car up after being told to not do so and get out of the car, the officer is now faced with potentially deadly force. There is no way for a police officer to know what the intentions of a driver is, and drivers can change which way they are going, use the steering wheel.
The second safest way to stop the car is to shoot the driver before it gets too close if it is aimed in your general direction. Then the officer can also move to jump out of the way. They cannot jump out of hte way if the driver is not shot as the driver will adjust their steering to keep aim at the officer. So, to keep safe, they have to shoot the driver and then jump out of the way.
that is the physics of it, it is very logical. Many officers are hurt or killed by not doing these things.
in the case of the woman you referenced, there was no way to know her intentions, her partner was being very agressive to the officers and is at fault for her death, why ? Because she told her wife to drive, to go. She told her that when there was an officer walking at the front left corner area of the vehicle. He was clipped by the vehicle actually, I watch way to much of this at various angles. But even if he had not been, he had every reason to fear for his life. He does not know her intentions, lots of people are very intentional in trying to run over police, it is a very dangerous job.
The best thing to do in such a situation is to turn the car off when asked to, to get out of the vehicle when asked to. Even if you actually are not doing anything wrong, even if you are supposed to go somewhere. You can straighten it all out later. Many people are let go without charges at the scene, others at the station. It is common for their safety to handcuff aperson and have them sit int eh back of a patrol car, so everyone is now safe and there is no further escalation, as they ask questions and figure everything out. Other times a person is arrested, which again may or maynot result in charges brought. The thing is, if you realy were doing nothing wrong and now you dont comply as they investigate, well now you are doing something wrong and breaking the law. So, obviously, the woman was breaking the law at the point she did not turn off the car ad get out when asked. This is not a third world military country we do not have people disappearing, in actuality it is the opposite, we drop charges or convict with the mildest slap on the wrist, probation and if you do it again, more probation. There was nothing to fear. There is alot of hysterics going on. It is very sad.
Stephen Pearson 190
> To return them to gravel involves a big machine coming in that breaks up the bitumen or concrete.. At least where I have seen this in Cali, that would involve the governments admitting to decline which they don’t want to do.
And I love the idea that gravel is a natural speed bump. My guess would be that speed of driving on gravel would be tops 40 miles per hour (mph) (64 kilometers per hour) (kph). Maybe not even that much.
I am all for “slow,” be it slow-cooking, slow-breathing, or slow-traveling.
“Slow” has been maligned for a hundred years (if not longer).
Less “more, more, more.”
More “less, less, less.”
In other words, down-shifting.
Jethro thinks nothing of driving the speed limit 55mph (88 kph) on the county/country roads here. I take issue with moving that fast on county/country roads. I say, “We live in the country and I’d rather not hit a deer, person, or raccoon. Why the rush?” I request he drives 40mph (64 kph). When he drives 55 mph, the cornfields whiz by; I get dizzy, feel disjointed and niggardly, and dread every inch of the ride. At 40 mph, I enjoy the ride, take in the view, don’t get dizzy, and feel splendid. When I drive, I drive 40 mph.
There is something luxurious about driving slowly, and enjoying the fields, wind, and barns, and getting to our destination two minutes later.
As for cars behind us, well, those people’s desired high driving speed is their business,— they can pass. I am not going to drive fast to make them happy. Times, they are a-changin’.
I am pro-gravel.
💨💻💩💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
gnat, re Marxism: Are you not beating a dead horse here. Marxism, or rather communism, had appeal in the mid 20thC because, as then Communist Milovan Djilas explained, (paraphrase) communism offered a way in which a country, like his Yugoslavia, or China, or Russia, could rapidly industrialize, and thereby have a hope of maintaining its’ borders and sovereignty against rapacious neighbors. Neighbors like Austria-Hungary and the British Empire, for example.
I will repeat a few basic facts which our host and others have pointed out more than once already’
1. “Socialism’ is not communism, despite claims by communists to the contrary.
2. ‘Socialism’ predates Marxism. I rather think that there is in reality very little originality in Marx’s doctrines.
3. Some countries, notably North Korea, China and Cuba, do retain one party rule. In the USA, MAGA is accused of wanting to install one party rule; what they really want, IMO, is a return to plantation economy, with themselves living lives of leisure on wealth derived from the exploited labor of others.
Jbucks @ 315, I share your concerns and your hop for a return to sanity in the peaceful friendship between our two nations. If you happened to see the not very good remake of a Western move, Train to Yuma, or something like that was the title, one character says to the struggling homesteader, “Your land is more valuable without you on it.”
The 52st. state rhetoric came from a faction of Trump’s wealthy backers who see in Canada vast resources and a small population and say to themselves, that should be ours. Those same folks ain’t about to admit into Congress 20 or so new senators and a similar number of representatives who almost certainly will not be Republicans. I do follow news and politics and I have seen no public sentiment to support this 51st. state notion. American voters have finally figured out that “ownership” and “opportunity” are for the rich only, not for themselves.
Robert Mathiesen 199
> Slavonic
I have a gap in knowledge about anything Slavic. I have a history book on Poland, to start. Also, the name “Zbigniew ‘Zbig’ Brzezinski” (1928-2017) keeps popping into mind. I can’t figure out if the guy was a good guy or a villain.
Zee-big, as I guess he was commonly called, I understand, was from Polish aristocracy,— definitely an elite, although under the radar.
💨🤴🏼📚💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Cory Doctorow has another new one out now, of possible interest, though he is still a techie. Blurb below:
The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It’s Too Late
It’s not enough to ask what the technology does – we must understand who it’s doing it for and who it’s doing it to
As we enter the age of AI, we are in danger of being reduced to what Cory Doctorow dubs the ‘reverse centaur’. With that term he conjures a human being conscripted as the assistant to a dominant machine. It could be a driver made to deliver nonstop, all day long; a warehouse worker packing shelves without bathroom or food breaks; or a programmer reviewing impossible amounts of AI-produced code.
Don’t fall for the hype! The billionaires managing the rise of AI are putting on a command performance for the bosses and investors, not for the ordinary people who might use the products. When this latest tech bubble bursts, will there be something useful for us in the wreckage?
In The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, Doctorow examines why we find ourselves in this mess and how we can get out of it. Life after AI should mean the tools work for us, not the other way around.
Justin Patrick Moore 208
Hi Justin,
I hope all is well with you!
> Rather than recognizing their offspring are struggling in a profoundly altered economic and social landscape, many instead lean into a narrative of rugged individualism, failing to see the harmful impact this has on their own families and thus society as a whole.
From a genealogical view, those adults who refuse to help offspring in major ways are insuring their lineage does NOT prosper. Their line will die out. This is just the opposite of what people did hundreds of years ago resulting in whom we refer now as “old money.” Old money didn’t happen by ignoring offspring. Old money families traditionally help(ed) descendants, often not only their own kids, but children of siblings. That is how, for example, the Rockefellers prospered as a clan. Helping offspring is how they got to be “old money“ in the first place.
In order for a family to reach the point of “old money,“ they first have to be “new money” during two-three generations. A family makes it “seriously traditional” in helping their youngers in smart and consistent ways.
By ignoring legitimate needs of offspring, families are not even going to make it to “new money”,— they are turning their offspring into “no money,” by which their lineage is doomed, because they are giving their offspring no more advantage than have welfare moms’ kids. It is a sink-or-swim mentality, and goes poorly for the kids. Starting from scratch is very time-consuming, taking up a person’s age from 18-33 simply to get established by way of money-making occupation. Marriage and home-buying take an additional ten to fifteen years.
It is the stupid leading stupid lives doing stupid things.
Mormon (Latter Day Saints) families flourish, for a reason: they support their children in many, many ways, over decades. For that matter, LDS-ers support their SIBLINGS’ children too.
💨🧑🧑🧒🧒🚶🏼♀️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@ gnat #312
“…that original ideas, management, skillful risk taking, and intelligence in general do NOT create wealth; that all the wealth is created by the animals who do the physical labor.”
Gnat, I do not know much about Marxist thought, but I know something about farming. And actually, on this farm I can confirm that 100% of its wealth is CREATED by the animals, and the plants, and the microbes, and the other ecological participants who carry out the physical “labour:” (and beyond that, the sun, which “enlivens” all of them).
We ourselves, for sure, contribute some original ideas, some management, we take risks (whether skillfully or not), and intelligence (as well as some labour of our own) but our contribution is more about DISTRIBUTING the wealth that nature provides to us, not about CREATING it.
What do you say to this observation of mine? Taking it entirely outside of the realm of political theory, and into the actual world of lived experience?
To JMG and anyone else who cares to read (maybe no one – I would not be offended):
Here are my further thoughts about the interaction between the fractal patterns endogenous to financial markets, and the real physical world exogenous to them, for what it is worth:
One thing I realized only in the course of writing these combox responses to your recent articles about the fractal patterns that constitute the forms of irrational herding behavior in markets is the following. The idea that these fractals are patterned and mathematically governed, but not deterministic, is key. The non-deterministic character of these fractal patterns helps explain why exogenous factors in the physical world, such as Peak Oil, or the discovery of several elephant-sied oil fields, or what have you, invariably lead to developments in the markets that are effects of these physical events as causes, but with the markets nevertheless sustaining the fractal forms inherent to them regardless.
The fractal nature of the endogenous dynamics of markets, not being deterministic, allows for multiple alternative paths that remain true to the fractal laws governing the endogenous form even in light of the contingency and variability of what affects markets in the real physical world. The exogenous events helped determine which of the often very finite number of possible paths the endogenous fractal forms of markets take. This principle applies to all degrees of the fractal trend, with the proviso that larger degrees of trend often do affix the range of possible fractal outcomes at lesser degrees of trend to a predetermined range of outcomes that is strictly limited.
Many technical analysts of financial markets who try to time turning points in markets based on analyzing their endogenous fractal forms fall into the erroneous view that, because markets invariably follow the mathematical laws of these fractal forms, then therefore the outcomes in the fractal patterns are exclusively endogenously determined. Therefore, they mistakenly deny any relevance at all to exogenous factors.
But the fact is that the non deterministic nature of the fractal forms at all degrees of trend in the pattern always admit of multiple outcomes – maybe not at a given degree of fractal trends or any larger degree – but almost always at smaller degrees. Generally speaking, the number of possible fractal outcomes are only a handful of a number with regard to the pattern completion of any unfolding trends, but when you take into account the full history and future of the market at all levels of trend of the unfolding fractal patterns, there is a great deal more variety of possible outcomes. Which of the possible number of outcomes of the pattern turn out to actually develop is in significant measure the result of exogenous events, and also of human individual free will.
Another thing that I realized long time ago that I think many technical market analysts overlook is that markets, and thus the fractally unfolding psychological dynamics that govern markets, do not merely consist of an irrational herd. Rather, I think that the fractal movements inherent to markets are better understood in terms of the dynamics of the interaction between predators and prey. The fractal dynamics inherent to markets are driven by the interaction between a small social elite class of manipulators who constitute the predators, and then the vast majority of ordinary market participants who constitutes the prey – and also the herd. But the herd does not act in isolation. Rather, it is constantly being predated upon by the predator class as it makes its contribution to the overall unfolding of the fractal market outcomes. The predator class also makes a significant contribution to determining these endogenous fractal outcomes.
Thus, I believe that the irrational mass-psychological dynamics that lead to the fractal patterns that financial markets display encompass both the predator and the prey class acting in tandem, with the predator class fulfilling its role of taking advantage of the prey, and the prey class fulfilling its role of reacting irrationally to being taken advantage of. But those taking advantage of the prey within markets are also ultimately subject to the same irrational impulses that are both governed by, and help to determine, the fractal forms the markets display as they unfold over time.
Taken in sum, then, it is this interaction of predators and prey that gives rise to the endogenous component helping lead over time to the development of the markets’ fractal form. But in addition to the predator/prey dynamic that is endogenous to the markets then, there are additionally physical events exogenous to the markets that contribute to help determine which particular possible fractal paths the markets actually take in as well.
I submit this as a modest contribution of my own toward the enterprise of trying to understand the intricacies and complexities of how the substructure of what happens in the real material world interacts with the notional hallucinated superstructure that constitutes the monetary and financial realm.
To Archane Activist,
I don’t mind, and thank you! I welcome any comments of substance by anyone to my thoughts in these comments – I am in the process of trying to work out my own ideas on these matters, and my ultimate interest is the truth.
I regard truth-seeking as a collaborative enterprise, but you have to collaborate with people who know what they are talking about. Those who deny Peak Oil, or are ignorant of it, do not.
@ Atmospheric River # 326
Thank you. 🙂 you did indeed offer one or two answers to the physics question.
Of course everyone is very exercised by the politics question, and by the discerning of the intentions of all the actors question, both of which, to me, are – and no doubt will remain – matters of deep mystery.
Anonymous 210
> if the wildfire smoke currently blanketing much of the Midwest and the North East ends up an yearly event, how bad will that be for Americans living there?
I live in southern Wisconsin. As anecdotal evidence, the smoke we got from Ontario, Canada, a week or so ago, here at my house, lasted 36 hours. After a day and a half, the smoke had cleared out, dispersing with winds from west to east, heading to the East Coast, and then out over the Atlantic Ocean.
Community advice is that during smoky time, stay in air conditioning as much as possible. (It is not the time to debate air conditioning.)
Other people likely have a different experience. For us, at our current location, smoke from wildfires in Canada have not affected us but a smidgen. Even previous years of the same, other regions’ smokiness’ influence was negligible. It appears the winds of the northern MidWest have made others’ smoke move out of here pronto.
💨🔥🌬️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
“What I didn’t expect was that oceans of cheap credit would be manufactured from thin air in order to prop up the fracking industry for political reasons.”
It wasn’t just the fracking industry, after the Great Financial Crises the Fed had a low interest rate policy for the general economy hoping that it would repair the damage. It sort of did, but they underestimated how much damage it was doing to the people relying on interest income from bonds. It was called Financial Repression, they knew they were doing it and didn’t care. The greatest good of the greatest number, etc.
As to speeds on gravel roads, that depends on how bad the washboarding happens to be. 65 is no problem on a good gravel road. 30 might still be too fast on a washboarded one. Yes you can go fast enough on a washboarded road to only hit the tops and get a reasonably smooth ride, but you can only steer when the tires are in contact with the road. 😉
Thanks to Chris at Fernglade, Tyler , Atmospheric River, and others for the battery discussion. The sodium ion batteries sound really promising for my application. I watched a few video reports and I will keep an eye on the technology. I had assumed there was nothing better than Li ion on the horizon and glad to find I was wrong.
Lithium mining is horrible for the environment, but also, the Na ion batteries do not require cobalt, nickel or even copper. Not requiring nickel is very good news for me because we are once again facing a proposed nickel mine in our mountains in SW Oregon. The serpentine geology here supports wondrous botanical diversity but also contains significant amounts of nickel. I would hate to see this landscape torn up and our rivers polluted. We have some of the most beautiful clean rivers around.
@gnat,
1. What stops you from getting up at 6am on Standard Time in the dark and enjoying all the daylight after work? Do you have an employer who won’t let you start work earlier? It sometimes seems to me that getting up “later” is a class marker. At least in Germany, getting up “early” is a blue-collar thing.
2. I’m always surprised at the emotional reaction against socialism from people living in the USA. Mind you, I don’t think the labor theory of value is complete enough to be useful and I certainly don’t propose installing a socialist government. I simply don’t get the emotional vehemence when only two rather small countries in the world are socialist nowadays. I lived in Leipzig in the former GDR for a while and never got such emotional outpours from anybody who had actually lived through the repressive socialist regime. On the other hand, some people would spout tirades about how everybody just says “Amen” in church (particularly ironic in the city of the Monday Demonstrations) or how the Germanic tribes had lived very well without a religion. I suppose the after-effects of propaganda vary from place to place…
@Northwind Grandma (#330):
Ancient animosities die very, very hard within the Slavic world, if they ever die at all — which I doubt.
One of the oldest of these animosities goes back more than 1,000 years, between Slavs who are historically Roman Catholic and Slavs who are historically Eastern Orthodox. The line dividing the two starts on the Adriatic coast, runs between Croatia (Catholic) and Serbia (Orthodox), divides as it moves northward to go around Bosnia. (Bosnia was originally a rare “heretical” variety [“Bogomil”] of Christianity, later it almost completely converted to Islam, to stick it to both Catholics and Orthodox.) The divided line rejoins itself north of Bosnia, goes between two non-Slavic countries, Hungary (Catholic) and Romania (Orthodox), and then runs down the middle of Ukraine and Belarus, ending at the Baltic Sea between Poland (Catholic) and non-Slavic Lithuania (Orthodox). The fact that this line runs down the middle of present-day Ukraine goes a long, long way toward accounting for the hideous complexities of present-day Ukrainian geopolitics
Poland lies on the Catholic side of this line (West of Ukraine and Belarus), Russia on the Orthodox side (East of Ukraine and Belarus). And each of the two nations has tried to invade and subdue the other more than once over the ensuing long centuries, with the difference in their religions advanced as the principle motivating factor.
The precise details of this 1000-year conflict are messy in the extreme and need not concern us here; but yes, Zbigniew Brzeziński was Polish and of noble (szlachta) ancestry, and that was enough for him to be a life-long bitter, bitter enemy of Russia (and, incidentally, also of the former Soviet Union).
Of course, as a European it was also natural for Brzeziński to try to use the USA — which he regarded as a johnny-come-lately, semi-legitimate, but highly useful dupe of a nation — as an unwitting vehicle for his animosity toward Russia; and he largely succeeded. (Victoria Nuland seems to me to be another major player with this attitude.)
Like almost every major player in world geopolitics, including a majority of the world’s heads-of-state, Brzeziński was a nasty piece of work. As Lord Acton once sagely wrote, “Great men are almost always bad men.” Amen, Lord Acton!
Justin, thanks for this. It’ll be interesting to see how his predictions stack up when the current AI boom has gone the way of all heavily marketed bubbles.
Denizen, I’ll leave that sort of thing to the technical analysts. My interest in speculative markets is confined to their impacts on the broader society, and a much broader brush is quite adequate there.
Siliconguy, what I’m not sure of — and will probably never know — is just how important propping up fracking was to the people who made those decisions.
Mary Benet#328
I think that you are confusing marxism-Leninism- Troskism (world revolution from Russia) with stalinism (socialism first in Russia)
JMG,
Thank you very much for your response – That was helpful and enlightening.
Here are two further questions:
1) Can the development of morphological structures over time ever have predictive value, and if so, under what circumstances?
2) With reference to the history of the current financial bubble, which goes back to early 2009, is it possible, in your view, to advance a meaningful explanation as to why it has not burst much sooner? If so, what is it? Or does the very posing of the question, in your view, import a causal analysis into a morphological discussion where that is out of place?
Chauquin (#302) Re: human-powered technology, e.g., power-take-off (PTO) from stationary bike: I very convenient rule-of-thumb is that a fit adult human can produce about 100 W of power for a full day (let’s call it 10 hour), and higher levels for short periods of time. It nets out at 1 kWh per day, for which we currently pay something like $0.20 from the grid. Grid-delivered electric power is a fantastic bargain! A day’s labor, for 20 cents!! We pay current rates, not for the value it provides us (which is vastly greater), but based on the cost of production (generation, transmission, and distribution). Single-use battery power is much more expensive, but we use it because the pocket radio or flashlight gives us more than a $1 value for a $1 of expense, even though a AA cell provides 2 Ah * 1.5V or 3 Wh (not kWh), for about $1 each ($330 per kWh).
Dear JMG and commentariat:
The proliferation of data centers, given their energy and water demands, strikes me as an equivalent of standing by the edge of a cliff, saying “we have a big problem”, then jumping off and saving “maybe this is the solution “!
And for those who say, electricity via renewable energy, each intermediate step in energy production from the original fuel (natural gas to electricity; photovoltaics to electricity, etc.) generates heat.
The three laws of thermodynamics:
-You can’t win
-You can’t break even
-You can’t get out of the game
And, as an aside, I feel like a kid again! Fusion is just around the corner!
Cugel
Scotlyn 239
> the item will continue to “sell” you and your wares into the future
Only if the artisan has put a permanent stamping/stamper/label (something that will still be there in twenty years, won’t wear, and won’t fall off) on the bottom of the item giving name & full contact information. When sell an item, include a magnetic business card that the client will likely put on their fridge; once on a fridge, it tends to stay there forever.
💨🔡📇💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
To JMG (#342),
Thank you for your response, and fair enough.
What makes you certain that the current speculative bubble will collapse in notional monetary terms, where the number of units of the notional monetary terms moves toward a fraction of what it is now in measuring the value of financial instruments, but with the purchasing value of the monetary unit itself remaining more or less constant in the real material world?
One can conceive of a situation where the financial collapse as a whole instead takes the form of a collapse toward the limit of zero in the real-world purchasing value of the monetary units themselves. In that case, notionally, there would be no crash, but perhaps a steady-state in the notional value of financial instruments, or even a net increase in their notional value, even while their real-world purchasing value equivalent collapses. (The latter variant could happen if the rate of increase in notional monetary units at which financial instruments are valued exceeds the rate of decrease in the real-world purchasing value of the monetary units.)
Do you rule out the latter possibility, in either of its variants? If so, why?
For what it’s worth, here in BC we get wildfire smoke from California and the US west cost sometimes. Smoke doesn’t care about international borders.
In regards to Israel support: for the non-Americans and/or non-Christians and non-Jews, there is a repeated theme in the Hebrew scriptures (in Christianity commonly called the Old Testement), that God will bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel. This story plays out over and over, some of the iterations in very children’s Sunday School friendly ways (The talking donkey story! or Balaam’s ass). It’s a known and familiar command to traditional and evangelical Christians, and even the mainstream milksops have met it and had to reason it away. It’s a divine command. A good chunk of Trump supporters believe in it. Not supporting Israel is anathema. The “how” is possibly debatable, the “what” is not.
In regards to Iran: they declared war on the USA in 1979 and have never requested a peace treaty. The USA isn’t starting a war, it’s finally finishing it. Whether or not you agree or disagree with these statements, again, a good chunk of Trump supporters believe this. And Iran’s declaration of war on the USA is historical fact, so there is no persuasion otherwise.
In regards to Canada: we have been hearing for years that Canada admits those from overseas who wish us ill and lets them loose with that long open border. (I have seen no evidence that Canada is worse about visas than the USA is: we both are terrible about admitting people who should not be.) As Canada is fairly unpopulated, and those few people who do live there mostly live close to the border with the USA, and Canada makes roadtrips to our northernmost state a pain, and is embroiled in all sorts of political footsies with countries we consider unfriendly, bullied their population mercilessly during Covid, etc., (I believe y’all know the whole list better than I do) a lot of Trump supporters figure the average Canadian citizen would benefit from leaving the control of the Canadian government. I’ve seen it tossed around that if Alberta wanted to join the USA we could admit Puerto Rico as a state at the same time, keeping the Senate in balance, and since the House is not equally representing the population numerically, and the 2020 Census fruad, might as well use the admission of two new states to sort out the House mess (see Wyoming plan for one of several schemes). Mexico much the same as Canada, but that would require military invasion because of the cartels their government is refusing to deal with. After all, everyone in the world wants to be American, right? If they didn’t then we wouldn’t have illegal immigration! (Can you see me rolling my eyes? Assimilation is a very modern motivation for immigration.) It’s the equal and opposite reaction to the American Europhilles and Sinophilles.
Jack 246
> Laurentian Canada
The St. Lawrence river/seaway valley is much more important to Canada+USA because of the 300-year old trade route from the Great Lakes-Montreal-Albany, New York-New York City-Chesapeake Bay, and back again. New York City is interested in Montreal because Montreal sits on the St. Lawrence Seaway, and from there has access to the Great Lakes’ cities of Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee.
In the 1800s, my mother’s father’s side, Isaiah’s (from County Norfolk, England 1840), ancestors emigrated and became farmers and canalers along the western shore of Lake Champlain and the canals attached to the lake. Between having a farm, a general store in the Mechanicville area, marine skills of sailing and engines, and mechanical skills to repair boat engines, the whole batch of them did very well as working people go. Albany and points west were the Erie Canal.
My father (born 1924), home-base Queens, New York City, was a merchant marine (going for captainship when he died of heart attack at 42) bargeman delivering petroleum (ahem!) plying the waters between the Chesapeake Bay (Philadelphia; Wash DC; Baltimore), up over the St. Lawrence River, to Montreal, then on to the Great Lakes. (All his life, my dad partied too much, resulting in an early death.)
I seriously doubt that western Canadian provinces of “British Columbia-Alberta, Saskatchewan-Manitoba” combination and points north, can out-compete the commercial importance of the eastern and midwestern regional combination of “Montreal-St. Lawrence Seaway-Boston-Ontario-Quebec-Great Lakes-Chesapeake Bay” and ties to New York City.
I think British Columbia’s residents think too much of themselves. Ottawa will dump Vancouver WAY before it will risk the commercial Eastern Seaboard power-hub of Montreal, Toronto, Quebec City, New York City, Boston, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, WashDC, and Baltimore.
What is Vancouver known for? Fish, fog, tourists, sightseeing, immigrants, and high cost of living. Not much else. Nope, western Canada is done for.
💨🇺🇸🇨🇦⛵️⛴️🐟💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
JMG and others, there’s a quite detailed set of visualizations of energy usages at this URL: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-where-households-pay-the-highest-energy-bills/
Fascinating stuff; lots of detail for different countries and different energy sources. Fracking is not specifically mentioned, but natural gas output increase is really quite startling.
@ Seeweedy,
Sounds like you are int eh USA. We used to have what I call salt water batteries which are sodium ion batteries, they were commercially sold and very popular with off grid installations in California. The anode and cathode were carbon for one and maganese for the other ( exceedingly common and less bad to source) with a synthetic fabric separator. They came in a stack in plastic casing that is the standard kind to put in the recycling, so end of lifetime was to pour out the electrolyte, put the plastic outside casing in teh recycle bin ( or biomass to be burned for power) throw away the bits. Which I havent done yet. They are heavy, so not for mobile applications and they have a slower power draw than LiFePo batteries, you can take less amps out at once, which is fine when sized right. I relied on fuses to protect mine and lost one in the fire ( my house itself is here, other locations on the property with power backup and the power poles burned down and melted wires together causing an extreme spike in power draw) so since they are not made or sold in the USA anymore, I could not get a replacement.
SO, the company, Aquion, went bankrupt, it did not have enough capitol to get thru the initial years. Its patent and intellectual property was sold to a USA China partnership ( on paper as .gov money was used by Aquion and had to have a USA buyer or somesuch) effectively it was sold to China and has been further refined in China. You cannot get it here anymore.
I limped along with just the 2 Aquion batteries for a couple years and then replaced with LiFePo, the brand I bought is Simplify which is now owned by Briggs and Stratton but they might still call the battery Simplify and they are still USA made. If you buy LiFePo batteries you must get a known well made good brand. This chemistry should not have thermal runaway issues. Do not buy Power Walls, first too pricy, second different lithium chemistry ( unless changed recently) so not good in a fire ! Third, power walls wont initiate and turn back on without access to the internet. This might sound benign, but in emergency situations this can make them bricked and useless.
The advantage to simple solar, like basic inverter and batteries that dont need battery management and such is how they work when things go wrong. SO look to off grid, many listed under off grid do work grid tied also.
((The fire gave this neighborhood a look at how things are to live without services. It takes a while to put up power poles and string wire, and then they have to string more wire to get the internet back too. My next door neighbors have 2 power walls and solar and that ran the refrigerator and whatever else might have been plugged in until it ran out of juice and the smoke in the sky kept the panels from making new power and recharging, and the power poles all burned down, so no power coming in from there, so the system then shut down. Same happened at my house with the extra that my batteries shut down and had damage. We were all evacuated for a few months. She and I come back before services are back, so no grid power, no internet, no phone lines, we never have cell phone service, no water (no power means no well water and my well was a melted slag heap with melted water tanks in any case). I initially cant stay in the garage long enough to diagnose, so all I know is batteries not working, I turn off breakers to the outside world and the backed up burnt places, the sun is now out, so I press on on my off-grid type inverter and I now have power to the other backed up circuits in the house while the sun is shining, this does me no good for a while. but in most cases it will help. She has none, then within another month they finish restoring Grid power and her system can now see the grid power, she figures she can restart — nope — the power walls wouldnt start with sun on the panels and grid power back — they needed to see the internet ! SO she had to wait for those lines to get restrung to make the system work. My batteries were off line until I could diagnose, so I had power in the daytime only and had to walk into the garage and press a button every morning. After a while I had a temporary plug into the contaminated well pump powered by my solar system day time only at first, for irrigation, wetting down soil/ash and cleaning purposes only, not potable and no controlling, just plug into a new socket on toasted wires to the garage ( well was on a battery backup circuit) and it runs until you unplug. a few 200 ft hoses connected in series. ))
What to take away from this: you have to think about what you want and need. Your local solar companies want to do one type of design and install, the thing they like to do and is easiest, for the most part. YOu need to define what you want and look for the right solution for you. You may find a smaller solar installer who does a wider variety of systems, or you can hire an electrician to connect what you decide to buy. There are at least 3 major online solar stores that have been around forever and are good, I have used NAZ Solar Electric , put that in a search engine, ( they used to be Northern Arizona Wind and Sun I think). They have technicians, they will advise and design and send out to you batteries for your current set up or batteries and different inverter, depending what you decide you need. You can get a system that will work when things go bad, if that is what you want. It is what I want, I want resiliency, otherwise I have nothing when everything else goes away. Yeah, I was here for a bit in a 12 ft travel trailer int he driveway, drove in with a charged 12V and 2 fullpropane tanks on that one, and the fresh water tank full. Ran the fridge off of propane. Went easy on the water. Read by flashlight. Mailordered a portable solar panel/charge controller that RVers use to keep the trailer battery up and then could use lights. Then Pg and E powered up. But no potable water for about 11 months after the fire.
Trailers are fantastic self contained low power solutions. They are so small, it doesnt take much to heat them, but an uninsulated one like the one I had can be very cold by the morning with the heat off. Trailer components, used from a trailer that is trashed, can be repurposed to use. A trailer refrigerator that can run off of propane might be a good solution for someone who must keep insulin or other medicines cold. It might be a good backup if you are rural and might get your power becoming more intermittent or gone, as currently a small old working trailer 2 or 3 way refrigerator might be bought cheap. ( 2 way is propane or 120V A/C elelctric; 3 way is propane, 120V A/c or 12V D/C battery to power) Trailer supply places sell 12V lights and radios and chargers and fuses and connectors for 12V systems to recharge when plugged into “shore power” 120V A/C grid power. You can salvage stuff from a rotten older trailer and bring home and do a small set up in a shed or room of the house. You can buy a small solar panel/charge controller like I used for a couple hundred bucks. You now have some basic needs met
Mary Bennet 251
> Mme. Clinton, Herself, the female (I refuse to call her a lady) who, like essence of skunk, just does not go away, has decided that 2028 just might be Her Year. God help us
Essence of skunk: perfect.
Oh, goody, yet another octogenarian. Real good time to cut her down. MsPantyHoseryCantStop past tense. This is what our ‘lauded’ healthcare system is for, to keep the likes of HER CORPSE walking around and speaking? Can she even dress herself? OMG.
What a doofus she is. Have you seen a recent photo of MrHubbyBallCribtin? He looks like death-warmed-over; no vitality whatsoever. He ain’t gonna help. Hang it up, MsHellaryCantManageIt.
Hoolery: blah blah blah.
💨🗣️🤯😶🌫️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Jessica 286
JD Vance is looking like, assuming he runs in 2028, I will vote for him. Everything considered, voting straight Republican is “the least damaging.”
Trump, I don’t know what the f— happened to him. He lost me.
There will NEVER vote Demoncrat😈again. I was brought up Democrat. I voted Democrat until the 2000s. Now I vote straight Republican, because at least “those people think.” Republicans also want to reduce taxes, which I am all for.
No more “taxation without representation.”
💨😈💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Hi John Michael,
Thanks for the link, and I’d not previously read your story. I may have jumped on board the ADR blog in 2007 or maybe 2008.
A moth eaten blanket is fine metaphor, and yeah, after too many holes, it’s not going to keep you warm at night. 🙂
It is also worth mentioning, that natural gas, which I believe describes methane, has a lower calorific value than either butane or propane, which have a lot more bang for buck. Still, it’s useful stuff.
Interestingly, we’re different to Canada down here, although our leaders do look towards the EU and the land of stuff, Japan, India (whomever, we like overlords!) But when push came to shove during WWII, it could no longer be pretended that Europe was geographically close and the UK fell in Singapore taking plenty of Aussies down in the process, whereas the US is just over the other side of the Pacific and showed up to lend a hand. There was cost for that, but then the UK used to levy a cost too. That’s life.
Oh, I agree with you about reading the overall signs of a market. A person can get lost in the details and tangled up in arguments. The arty-fish-al mania, appears to eat money, which is a different experience to turning a profit, as a thing (shades of Robert E Howard there!) Man, when you’re reading articles in the paper about private credit lending to such businesses, it may already be too late. And that is not the only ill winds raising a stink from that sector. Oh well, it is a choice to be involved.
And sodium batteries. Hmm. When they’re commercially available and the claims proven in real world verifiable installations, I’ll be impressed. Until then… I knew a local bloke who bought them for an off grid setup. He called them salt water batteries, and the voltage drop was horrendous. There is hype, like the markets, and then there is reality. Oh well. I find myself saying that a lot nowadays. Probably age, or something like that. 🙂
Cheers
Chris
“1. What stops you from getting up at 6am on Standard Time in the dark and enjoying all the daylight after work? Do you have an employer who won’t let you start work earlier? ”
Yes! That is often the case. The other case is “sure you can come in early, but quitting time is X and you WILL stay until then.” And in US labor law if you are an “exempt” worker then you don’t get paid for the extra time either. So you stick with the posted hours.
The operator’s at the chemical plant (or the mine) were on rotating shift so their hours are also non-negotiable. The plant always needs tending. Since the operators are non-exempt by law they do get overtime and management certainly won’t willingly pay someone 1.5 times the normal hourly rate when they can have someone do the job at the normal hourly rate.
Robert Mathiesen (#341)-
A minor correction if I may (from a fellow historical linguist): the line separating Western and Eastern Christianity does not divide Poland and Lithuania: rather, it divides Russia from the three Baltic States, Lithuanian, Latvia and Estonia: All three are part of Western Christianity, the former remaining Catholic (and thus is the Northeastern-most majority Catholicism country in Europe) and the latter two having become Protestant during the Reformation.
JMG –
In the days of the Archdruid report I admired how carefully researched your posts were, and how you openly admitted that in some cases you did not know something asked by some reader(s). A phrase you repeatedly used with your non-American commentators asking for your view on some matter relating to their country was (paraphrasing slightly) that you had never lived outside the United States and that the last thing the world needed was another clueless American pontificating on non-American matters.
You might consider returning to this tradition, and indeed a first step might be banning any discussion of Canada in your comments. As a Canadian who follows his country’s politics in both its official languages quite closely, I am quite beyond aghast at the amount of misinformation on the topic of Canada found in this thread (and indeed many others where the topic of Canada came up).
This is unsurprising unfortunately. A fact Americans such as yourself, JMG, need to be aware of is that most anglophone Canadians live in an almost purely American media universe. As a result, they are as a rule as ignorant about most aspects of their country as…well, the average American citizen is about Canada. Whatever positive or negative features the American mainstream media dreams up/fantasizes/projects unto Canada are thus…instantly believed and echoed by most anglophone Canadians.
Any dialogue between Canadians and Americans (within this thread, for example) is thus akin to an echo chamber repeating and amplifying American perceptions rather than to a genuine dialogue between citizens of two separate countries, each with separate media spheres.
Thus, your statement in #325 (“but the comprador class that runs Canada has been trying to switch its allegiance from the US to the EU. That’s one of the core factors behind the current mess”) is to my knowledge utterly baseless. I fear, however, that most anglophone Canadian Ecosophia readers are liable to simply accept these and other groundless statements and not to challenge any of your other errors/misconceptions about Canada. You have often praised your commentators for correcting your errors. You cannot count on your anglophone Canadian commentators to do so, because anglophone Canadians as a rule derive their knowledge of the outside world, including knowledge of “their” country, from the American media sphere.
I’m currently reading “Not the Future we Ordered,” continuing the theme of the decline of imperial industrial civilization as you write these blog posts. I must say, while your predictions got the exact order and speed of events and crises wrong, the overall picture you painted wasn’t incorrect. You really just assumed we would be in for an immediate quarter century of crisis followed by one of relative stability, when we got one of relative stability followed by what’s likely to be a quarter century of crisis. Mixed up the cart and the horse, but you still sketched an accurate picture of the buggy and where it’s headed…
Indeed, it seems the governments of the world were united in one aim until recently – keep the spice, er, oil flowing at all costs, keep the economy growing. Despite varying geopolitical interests and ideologies, they all were based on modern industrialism, and thus had a convergence of needs that trumped them all – much as the rivalries between the houses in Dune were set aside the second the spice flows were threatened. And so we both around 2006 overestimated the immediate chaos to come by underestimating the extent to which every major power player everywhere would be willing to go to forestall the first two horsemen. You at least had the erudition and courage to publish your thoughts – though to be fair, I was 19 that year, had never heard of you, but somehow our thoughts were on the same wavelength.
But as you said, this didn’t stop the horsemen – public health decline has actually galloped along, birth rates are utterly plummeting. But it’s the 4th horseman who I am quite fascinated by – the current geopolitical crisis unfolding across the world. It seems the independent oil producing powers have realized they hold some serious trump cards, and are making their power plays as they see the western empire crumbling under its hubris and crisis, the lack of local energy and industry, and are recalling their old civilizational egregores. Russia is returning to its orthodox Christian imperial roots, reindustrializing and remilitarizing, restarting the age old conflict between the sibling civilizations, the two offspring of Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian civilization, the Catholics vs. the Orthodox, the western Europeans vs. the eastern. It seems Romulus and Remus are destined to contend forever… Meanwhile, Persia rises again to challenge the new Roman American empire, the Orient rises to challenge the Occident… So much for the end of history, for it sure seems to be repeating itself!
It seems like what was formerly strength has become weakness, and former weakness strength. The western powers, who ruthlessly exploited their fossil fuel resources to exploit others, once were dominant because of this, but now have drained their wells drier and drier. This is as true of the gulf monarchies as it is of Europe and America. Meanwhile, the nations who were formerly hobbled – Russia by soviet inefficiency and only now-melting permafrost, Iran by sanctions – find themselves atop some of the largest unexploited energy reserves left because of these former weaknesses, and they sure are acting like they’re aware of it. To be sure, their latest reindustrialization will be short lived, but they seem to realize it, that they have a limited window of opportunity to seize power regionally before the whole game is up. They don’t care if their star will fall as long is doesn’t fall as fast as ours and they come out on top of their regional power structure. Short sighted, but then again so is our planning…
Speaking of geopolitical planning – I’ve heard some very interesting news. Even as we ramp up aggression against Iran again, Trump is pulling all our troops out of Iraq! And considering leaving Syria and Lebanon! I swear, I’m getting historical whiplash! Are we expanding or contracting? Advancing or retreating? How do you do both at once? It could be simple palace intrigue – rumor has it the JD Vance America First faction wants retreat and retrenchment to the Americas, while being opposed by the Marco Rubio Israel First Neocons who still dream of controlling the world’s oil supply. Perhaps each is operating independently? Others claim Trump is playing some serous 5D chess, giving the neocons their Iran war wet dream while allowing it to drain our military stock and ultimately force our withdrawal from the middle east to the benefit of the America firsters. But I have an alternate theory, based on an idea from The King in Orange.
You presented the idea that Trump is being… guided? Used? Possesses? by the spirit of the Changer, the wild god from native American myth who arrives to upend the world. If this is the case, perhaps Trump long ago stopped trying to logically plan his actions, and just started trusting his gut. Sounds mad, but honestly in these chaotic times, good luck logically planning your way through these geopolitical headwinds. If you have the guidance of such a powerful god/egregore, who seems to have guided him to such improbably wild success, at a certain point trusting its guidance is the only reasonable course. I doubt he sees it in these terms – he probably thinks of it as his amazing instincts, the best instincts ever, or maybe the guidance of a vaguely Judeo-Christian god – but still, it’s working. It explains how he manages to seem like such a wildly chaotic buffoon and a strategic genius at the same time. He has no idea what he’s doing – but he doesn’t need to, because his guide sure does, and he just needs to be smart enough to follow it’s promptings.
Still, whether intentionally or not, I see the end of America’s presence in the middle east, and then most of the old world, resulting from these conflicts. The Changer sure is busy upending the game table! Ultimately, it will seem like victory for our enemies and defeat for us. Yet, if we manage a reasonable retreat, I think it will be the opposite. America will be well served by focusing on the continents with, well, America in their name – North and South America. Meanwhile, the rough alliance of barbarians outside the empire – China, Russia, and Iran – will quickly find that the external threat of our empire was the only thing they had in common, and will turn on each other in victory. Renewal through defeat, destruction through victory – ironic times we live in, huh?
Of course, the first two horsemen are still coming – but the fourth is charging at breakneck speed and is nearly upon us. May the Changer be merciful and help us writhe and leap out of his path!
Any thoughts, from our Archdruid or anyone?
Thank you very much.
Superb writing and thinking.
Lots of similarities here to these sites. A rising tide of consciousness on this subject is happening I think:
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/
@Boysmom #350
“In regards to Iran: they declared war on the USA in 1979 and have never requested a peace treaty. The USA isn’t starting a war, it’s finally finishing it. Whether or not you agree or disagree with these statements, again, a good chunk of Trump supporters believe this. And Iran’s declaration of war on the USA is historical fact, so there is no persuasion otherwise.”
I do know and understand that Americans usually start thinking about their relationship with Iran in 1979, when that relationship broke onto their television screens. Of course, Iranians tend to date the war that the American regime has been waging on THEM from at least as far back as 1953, when the CIA carried out its first official regime change operation – replacing the democratic government headed by President Mohammed Mossadegh with the repressive and dictatorial Shah, and moving to regain control of Iran’s oil resources, which the Iranians had elected Mossadegh to nationalise.
One thing I noticed when I arrived in the US in 1978 to attend college, having grown up a missionary’s daughter in Latin America, was how little grasp the Americans that I met in my family’s church, or even at the college I was attending, had of what the CIA was doing in other countries (for example, I knew all about what had been done to Chile just five years earlier). The CIA’s consistent pattern was to oppose and disrupt the prospect that any country and its people might benefit from their own resources, whenever such resources were commercially exploitable and considered “strategic” to US corporate interests.
Because most of these actions were carried out covertly, Americans generally had absolutely no idea of how this consistent pattern of disrupting other people’s self-sufficiency and of their local control of their local resources had and has affected people in all the (many, many, many) countries they have “regime changed” – including Iran – and therefore are generally utterly mystified when people of those countries start scrawling “Gringos/Yankees Go Home” on every wall, or chant “Death to America” at every protest.
Of course, as an obvious red-headed Gringa, I was never, not once, in all my years living in or travelling through Latin America, personally subject to such sentiments, or in any other country where people have good reasons to hold them. And I would have no hesitation in travelling in Iran should I ever be so lucky for the opportunity arise. Because what I know for certain is that ordinary people can very readily distinguish between me, an ordinary American person, and the American corporate-dominated regime which injured them, and they would not in a million years see themselves as being at war with ME. Only with my country’s regime.
To Robert Mathiesen,
Your analysis is interesting and useful, but I think you are mistaken about the Lithuanians. Yes, they are non-Slavic. But my understanding is that, among the Baltic peoples, Lithuanians are historically Catholic, Latvians are historically Lutheran, and Estonians are historically Orthodox.
To JMG and everyone else,
Hot off the presses, here is another potent indicator that the collapse-by-stealth (so far) caused by Peak Oil is picking up steam. The propogandists and presstitutes are trying to normalize the regularity of periodic blackouts in New York City:
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/next-phase-shrinkflation-rolling-blackouts
“Jessica, ah, but the comprador class that runs Canada has been trying to switch its allegiance from the US to the EU. ”
I don’t see how that could work for Canada given that the EU is itself mostly comprador. That is the only way I can explain the EU’s willingness to harm its own people and its own economy (and eventually even the interests of that very elite) at the behest of its master*.
Canada’s moves toward the EU are more performative to quiet down ordinary Canadians. Also, I think their moves are more a comprador class siding with the more mannered US elites against the current Trump faction, not a comprador class trying to find allies for gaining autonomy.
I am not seeing an entrepreneurial elite yet. I am seeing folks skilled at working the political process to secure monopolies of one form or another. At least in the US. Shenzen is another matter.
I have spent time in Europe this decade and have had the sense that at some deep level, Europeans still see Americans as the benevolent winners of WW2 and culturally vibrant (on a pop level) and if they envision Europe standing on its own two feet, it is goosestepping to the Eastern Front. Although the Greenland issue clearly changed folk’s minds in Denmark this last year, as has Gaza. At English-language stand-up open mics, Russian expat comics have longed needed to open their slot by apologizing for their country. This spring, some of the American expat comics were doing that too.
Also hot off the presses: Is the AI bubble beginning to pop now?
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/signs-panic-goldman-derivs-guru-warns-ai-credit-blowout-spilling-over-entire-market
I won’t believe the hype about the hype, either, myself.
Speaking, of this AI topic, and the practice of detournement, its been interesting to read some of the AI boosters who promote using AI music generating software as a form of plunderphonics.
“John Oswald coined “plunderphonics” in 1985 to describe compositions built almost entirely from recognizable fragments (“sonic quotes”) of existing recordings—primarily pop, rock, classical, and jazz—then transformed through deliberate manipulation. It is collage taken to an extreme, often with critical or humorous intent (recognizable sources are made strange or satirical).” ( https://ediblspaceships.substack.com/p/probe-suno-is-plunderphonics-on-full )
I have been a big fan of plunderphonics. It’s fun. But the artist who did this in the past decades didn’t use a vast dataset but was making it from their own response to the cultural environment and was a kind of human synthesizer of the material (mentat).
Cascone again:
“//i.e. instead of internalizing knowledge for intellectual synthesis, we merely cut ‘n paste units of info into content form.
//Instant utility of information
We create assemblages of information, i.e. content, from prefabricated units of info rather than manifest novelty via intellectual synthesis.
This partly explains the homogenization of content across all platforms.
//Metamodernity is merely the recombinatorics of sludge.”
So here I am cutting and pasting, but when I write nonfiction from my own research it emerges as a synthesis, and at the best of times, merges with the awen of my own inspiration and connection making. Same when a group like Negativland or Vicki Bennett engages in intensive collage of sources from their own deep knowledge of the material…
The statistical analysis of datasets back into sludge won’t do that. Looking forward to your mentat manual.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogJmXJF9Zrw
@Atmospheric River #280: “Why are we making people get an electric heat pump water heaters and space heating?” Well, the theory is that you can either burn the natural gas at 70-90% efficiency or you can use if to run a combined-cycle electrical plant at 50% efficiency, lose a another 10% in the grid (to get 45%), but then use that to run a heat pump with a COP (coefficient of performance) of 3 (so it moves 3 times more heat than it uses) for an overall efficiency of 135%. The devil, as usual, is in the details…
If you look at Google’s Ngram viewer you’ll see that discussion of Marx peaked in 1936, 1976, and 2016. Three peaks 40 years apart. Is there some significance there?
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=marx
JMG,
The latest on the Nuclear hopium front is that Constellation energy, which is apparently a company that runs some nuclear plants, is proposing a “new” model that they say will greatly speed up production of Small Modular Reactors. You see they are proposing the ” Shipyard Model” where all the major parts of the reactor will be built in American shipyards under efficient production standards using robots so years will be trimmed off the time it traditionally take to build a nuclear plant.
Since there are very few shipyards left in the US and they are really only used to build naval vessels so they must be the ones that turned out the Zumwalt, The Littoral combat ships and the latest nuclear aircraft carrier with such speed and efficiency. Problem solved.
https://www.bis.org/publ/work1367.pdf
Page 3, there was a canal boom? Was it just the Erie Canal?
I’ll have to look it up if I survive today’s plumbing repair job.
I’d like to chime in with a couple of data points. First, regarding gravel roads – here in SW Missouri, many of our county roads (including as of last week, mine) are what they call “chip and seal.” I got to watch it last week when they put it down. First came a machine that sprayed down a thick layer of oil onto the existing pavement. Behind it came a truck that sprayed small gravel chips on top of the oil layer. Behind that, a machine that rolled everything and pressed the gravel into the oil.
I spoke to one of the work crew. He said that in a few days/weeks, after use has pressed even more of the gravel down, another truck will come along and brush away the loose gravel. After compaction, these roads look very much like regular pavement, and drive quite cleanly. Our 50 mph speed limit hasn’t changed, and I don’t feel at all insecure driving at that speed.
This seems to be much less expensive than tearing up an existing pavement and laying new asphalt, and also less expensive to maintain. The road worker said it’s a better surface in the winter as well, being rougher. They’re still laying new blacktop on the highways, but most of the county level roads are now (or will be soon) chip and seal.
My other data point – I remember that one of the signs of an approaching market crash is when the “shoeshine boys” or regular consumers get into the stock market. Well, lately on the UTub I’ve been seeing frequent ads by a company called Phoenix Energy encouraging the average person watching the video to invest in their oil drilling company. That seems to me to at least rhyme a bit.
Thanks to JMG and all of the commentary for much food for thought this week!
MindWinds
Hi JMG,
I know you have discussed vinyl records meny times, but I was wondering if you had paid much attention to the return of the cassette tape? In some areas of underground/independent/local music the cassette has exploded driven partially by the demands on vinyl LP production (so much major label stuff appears on vinyl now, but the studios don’t have their own pressing plants anymore). This means there are huge waits and delays if bands want their music released that way, and cassettes are one of the ready alternatives.
There are some music genres where the cassette was an important formative tool of the scene, the metal world is like this, as is hip hop and I think some UK dance music scenes, These have a nostalgia for the medium as a sign of realness, and you’ll see some releases and reprints of earlier important titles. Along with the authenticity of them, there is a feeling of them being perhaps cute and personal, the way they connect to hand dubbed mix tapes, and their smaller size.
There are other things going on driving it too, but I’m not sure how much I understand them all. Partialy there is a handmade/DIY thing that can come into play with cassette tapes, and with low runs, special and unique packagaging can turn them into hand crafted works of art. I think for this reason they remained popular in experimental music scenes, and this has fed back into a strange positioning as the cassette as an avant garde medium – you wil occasionally see big artists release limited cassette runs.
Thanks,
Johnny
@Silicon Guy,
There were multiple canals involved in the canal boom, mostly in New York State, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Many of them fed in to the Erie Canal. A couple that I am familiar with are the Chemung Canal Near Elmira and the Seneca-Cayuga Canal connecting Cayuga lake to the Erie Canal. Many of them are still in operation. You can sail a boat from Ithaca New York to the Atlantic today using nothing but lakes and canals.
In terms of dysfunctional government and death by bureaucracy, I am currently in the middle of getting/trying to get a british passport as a dual citizen, since they’ve now decided that dual citizens MUST travel on their british passport, regardless of whether their other nationlity’s passport is easily accepted for everyone else. It is being a difficult and lengthy process, with lots of original documents required, and they don’t tell you what you need at the beginning, so you end up with giant delays and scrambling around for things you didn’t know you needed, and are in the possession of someone else, sometimes after you’ve paid and they’re badgering you to send your documents immediately.
It’s like they don’t want dual citizens to come to the UK.
@Denizen #365
>Also hot off the presses: Is the AI bubble beginning to pop now?
>https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/signs-panic-goldman-derivs-guru-warns-ai-credit-blowout-spilling-over-entire-market
You coult take into account also assume the scenario that this might be some steam letting, imagine Bloomberg and CNBC inviting Ed Zitron.
Imagine the amount of bots and Python algorithms trading in the market know, they can shorten the shorters into oblivion.
Regarding technology and the limits to growth, I’d like to quote this extract from the video “3 Limits to Growth After 45 Years – Dennis Meadows at Ulm University”. (YouTube transcript, my editing.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRXb4bJhSSw
14:49 — “The most common behavior we call overshoot and decline — going past boundaries and back down. At that time economists didn’t think there were limits, but if they would admit to a limit they somehow imagined that the market would bring us into a very gradual, even, orderly, adjustment to that. And we said no. Because of the delays, because of the erodible stocks in the system, the tendency is to overshoot and decline.
“We were at MIT. My first degree is in chemistry. I have been a professor of engineering for probably thirty years of my life, so we do understand about technology, and we put into the model many different technological assumptions. What we found was, technology doesn’t eliminate limits to growth, it shifts the burden from one limit to another, and may push back a little bit the period until things start to go down. But of course technology itself doesn’t change the problem. Technology is a tool. It’s used by people and institutions, and you can’t understand the future unless you understand the goals of those institutions.
“In order to get attractive results we had to go outside of technology and look at social and even economic changes. And we came to understand that the problems we talked about today — climate change, pollution of the oceans and so on — they are not problems, they are symptoms. They’re symptoms that the globe is starting to mount pressure to stop growth. In one way or another population and material and energy growth have to stop on a finite planet.
“And so it comes to the question — what are the pressures which will stop that growth? If they come from us they will be fairly attractive like birth control; if they come from the planet they will be fairly unattractive like famine or war or disease. But one way or the other these problems are going to come.”
Re-do
Northwind 322
The “ENS—TOCENE AGE”
is a quote from the book. I didn’t make it up. Sorry.
💨💻💩💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
It’s interesting to see the evolution of officially sanctioned ideologies in our time, and how they relate to this issue of energy descent. Even in my lifetime, I can still recall leftists having been environmentalists, supporters of small business, organic agriculture, skeptics of big pharma and big ag, and so on. It seems that in the 2020s they have finally jettisoned all of that. From JMG’s earlier books, there was a concept of “biophobia” being very strong among certain groups in the West – I believe particularly strong in the salary and PMC classes who make up a part of the ruling class in the West. In recent times they have gone back to a more utopian, techno-optimist and sterile vision of the future and abandoned whatever of their old commitments still remained. Insomuch that those old ideals exist anymore, they were subsumed into the green energy and climate change agendas, e.g. large-scale bureaucratic initiatives with themselves as the main beneficiaries of such policies. But the commitment to these things has also taken on a religious fervor. They want to totally replace fossil fuels and actually believe that we can maintain the standards of living they are accustomed to in what must necessarily be a much lower energy society. And I’ve tried to point out to these people why it will not work; but I no longer bother. They have absolutely no interest in hearing it. Unfortunately I think this tragicomedy just has to burn itself out as all ultimately-unattainable ideological projects do.
America’s grid and water resources will be badly strained by our frenzied build out of “that which will not be named” as well, adding additional challenges to an already fraught situation. The other remarkable thing about today is how many previous dissenters, for instance on the rightward end of the ideological spectrum, have been turned into techno-optimist true believers by “that which will not be named”, which is ultimately a mass surveillance and military-industrial project by the powers that be, at least partly motivated by the squelching of dissent at home. In a short time, these people have been again turned into enthusiastic supporters of the system. The system has been nothing if not resilient when it comes to bringing dissenters back into the fold by a variety of means.
All of this will make addressing the long term challenges of the Long Descent / Long Emergency more difficult. Although I still think there will be meaningful opportunities on the local and communal scale.
Robert Mathiesen 341
Wow. Thank you for taking time to expound upon Slavs.
An “all around in between people” seems apt. I will bring up my antenna whenever I see the word “slav,” so I learn more.
💨🥘💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@ chip seal
My neighborhood has to maintain its own roads, and we tax ourselves for it once a year, the roads are just chip seal, a few layers by now. There is no real pavement under it all. It had been years and we were overdue, couldnt do the whole road association so last month the 3 smaller roads were re-chip sealed. SInce it had been more than 20 years, some of the newer residents were surprised, they werent paying attention I guess. We all got an email wondering if we had seen the work and how we went backwards from pavement to a gravel road….We explained it was what we always do and all we can afford. We will not sweep off the excess as that will cost more, to get some street sweeper, next winters rains will take care of it, should look like a normal road again by spring. I hope we do the main road, which I live on, soon, as I think these things will continue on to un-obtanium. When you dont seal at all what happens is that the potholes and such that were patched let water in at the edges, as well as the cracks that form let water in so the road will decompose if left. There are a few weeds growing in the road in front of my driveway.
Anyways, chip sealing is much much more affordable, works decent for a low traffic residential road
Pygmycory (#374)
“It’s like they don’t want dual citizens to come to the UK.”
If many of the dual citizens are from the global South, it is possible that that is exactly the case.
@ Roldy gas heat vs heat pumps
I dont like things to be mandated, people needs vary. ANd, a house built for gas heat will need expensive upgrades to have heat pumps, upgraded electric panels, Not to mention the cost of the heat pumps. One heat pump for a room, not so bad, for a whole house is ALOT. The savings in many many cases dont pay for the cost to change over
Maybe as you say, it saves energy, or in reality about breaks even. That would be logical, except they are also not allowing new natural gas power plants and have been shutting the existing ones down ( California) the dirty secret being that we are now importing a good amount of electricity, but that doesnt count I guess as long as the other line items sourced within the state are not from “dirty” sources. I think in CA at least arguments are made to support a narrative that the lenocrats want. Also, the natural gas homes have alot of sunk costs, and not using those to throw that away to reinstall another method has not only its monetary hit, but the environmental hit of trashing stuff to install other stuff. This is an energy cost too that they dont count. BTW, not saying not to get a heat pump if you need one and it makes sense for your situation ! They can totally make sense. ANd my eldest, the house came with one in the living room only, they rarely use it, but it is not a bad backup to have to keep one room warm if on vacation or too sick to light a fire. Or too keep cool for a few hours on a summer canning day. One like that was not very expensive.
Electricity is at about .45/kWh now in California and will go up. My recommendation is for everyone to get a wood stove for a back up and plant some trees that love to be coppiced at the yard fencelines as well as any modifications for passive or active solar heat gain and planting grape vines ont eh house south side for summer. Make some good curtains. Then when you cant afford whatever heat you have you wont get ill from being too cold. Best to drop out of the control narrative.
“AI” bros have a lot of underhand moves to make it a few months more, they find some low hanging fruits using this stuff…
https://sea.mashable.com/tech/52641/ai-just-disproved-a-major-math-problem-a-mathematician-explains
Every time the bubble is about to pop expect, “AI solved this or that major math problem” etc…
1st, no one explains why this is a major problem;
2nd, this conjecture was apparently already disproven as far as I know;
3rd, how do we know the mathematician that is working for Anthropic didn’t work at that a lot in the last months, years
4th, I expect this kind of underhanded miracles to pop up from these companies ’til their last financial breath
@Silicon guy
BIS paper is import and there are other signals that are important for the money bags, now the smart money will have a signal to make an exit strategy, I think they are trying to find a bag holder. Most probably the shoe-shinners will be targeted to contribute to the AI market and hold the bag. Expect AI helping the common folk now…
@JMG
I frankly doubt that AI will replace the state bureaucrat plankton, that looks to me:
1) political drivel that will go the way of the dodo, or DOGE … a lot of republicans might rejoice to the thought that AI might replace radical left bureaucrat plankton.
2) narrative to get the rednecks and deplorables onboard with the bubble so that they hold the bag…
Dirt or gravel roads are fine and can be maintained fairly easily if you don’t want to go too fast, which should not be much of an issue during the decline. My point is that if bitumen or concrete roads are just abandoned or not maintained they become impassible in fairly short order as you end up with chunks of pavement interspersed with deep holes.
An old trick for driving fast on dirt roads, not that I recommend it is to drive on the wrong side of the road as you then sort of glide over the ruts. This was fairly common in rural Australia back in the day.
stephen
@Etienne (#358), Denizen (#352):
Lithuania is Catholic now, but it wasn’t Catholic for most of the Middle Ages. It effectively became Catholic only in the wake of the political Union at Lublin (i.e., a union with Poland) in 1569 and the ecclesiastical Union at Brest in 1596. To be sure, individual KIngs (“Grand Dukes”) of Lithuania had converted from their traditional Paganism to Catholicism from the 1200s onward — and in some cases, they later de-converted — but that was only a personal conversion, not a conversion of their land as a whole.)
Before the later 1500s the great bulk of the Kingdom’s subjects consisted of Orthodox speakers of what is sometimes called “Ruthenian,” a Slavic language far more closely related to Ukrainian and Russian than to Polish; they were not subject to Roman jurisdiction. One consequence of the Union of Brest (1596) was that this population became nominally Catholic (i.e., under the jurisdiction of Rome), but retained their Orthodox liturgy and rituals in Church Slavonic.
The original Lithuanian territory, a fairly small part of the whole Kingdom (or “Grand Duchy”) of Lithuania, taken as a whole, continued to have a largely Pagan population well into the late 1400s, and traces of Lithuanian Paganism remained well into modern times. (See Francis Young’s fine studies of the religious history of Lithuania.)
Re: Canada–I spent one year of school (8th grade, 1961-1962) in Canada. Learned that US invaded Canada twice–once, led by Benedict Arnold and the Green Mountain Boys in the Revolutionary War and again in the War of 1812. In neither case were the Americans a match for the crack British regiments defending Montreal. Each time, if I recall correctly, Americans assumed that the French in Quebec would enthusiastically join in throwing off the British yoke. However, the Roman Catholic French were aware that the American colonies, and successor states were largely Protestant, most retaining a state church, and distrusted US rule. The Canadians were quite stoked at the idea of having defeated the US twice. There were also some border skirmishes in Saskatchewan. but I don’t recall much about them.
As for memories of the Great Depression–My grandmother used to subscribe to a magazine that specialized in articles about US history. One issue was devoted to the Depression. She had grown up in the Arkansas Ozarks and told me that her family had been so poor that they didn’t know there was a Depression going on: “we couldn’t get any poorer”. Christmas was a couple of oranges and some nuts in a stocking, no Christmas tree or store-bought gifts. Her feet were deformed from having to wear one pair of shoes per school year, regardless of whether her feet grew. The family eventually moved to better circumstances. At one point they lived in Colorado where my great grandfather worked for an oil refinery. Grandmother was quite proud that when a barnstorming pilot ran out of fuel while doing a show in town her father worked out the formula for aviation fuel and produced enough for him to fly to the next stop. However, after her father died the family traveled the west picking crops: berries and table peas in Washington and Oregon, apples in the California foothills, then back down to Arizona. Between traveling and the need to work none of the older children completed high school.
Rita
Etienne and Robert Mathieson,
“A minor correction if I may (from a fellow historical linguist): the line separating Western and Eastern Christianity does not divide Poland and Lithuania: rather, it divides Russia from the three Baltic States, Lithuanian, Latvia and Estonia: All three are part of Western Christianity, the former remaining Catholic (and thus is the Northeastern-most majority Catholicism country in Europe) and the latter two having become Protestant during the Reformation.”
That is not strictly true either. Estonia is historically Orthodox. Indeed, it has its own so-called “autocephalous” Orthodox church structure and heirarchy.
Lithuania is historically Catholic, which I think facilitated their alliance with the Poles at certain points in the past. Latvia is historically Lutheran.
Late in the cycle, I know, but I saw a news story today that made me think of this thread. Apparently there’s been so many incidents with people stealing copper plates off road bridges here in my region of southeast Norway that the authorities have decided to stop using them, in favor of less attractive materials like aluminium or steel. The headline claimed “almost 30 copper thefts in half a year”. Of course the journalist managed to spin it as a sign that Progress is still kicking, by reasoning that copper is expensive because it’s useful for renewable energy, but I couldn’t help think of the Ecotechic Future and the era of salvage. Also figures that this is apparently being done by foreign organized crime, whose increasingly brazen presence might honestly be one of the more visible signs of decline in this country.
@ Jessica #365
“I have spent time in Europe this decade and have had the sense that at some deep level, Europeans still see Americans as the benevolent winners of WW2 and culturally vibrant (on a pop level)”
I think there’s some truth to that in this corner of northern Europe, especially but not only among the older generations. At the same time, the presidencies of George W. and Trump also did immense damage to the United States’ reputation here among most people. I also find it “bleakly amusing” (as our host might say) to see how often Norwegians indulge in open snobbery towards Americans, in spite of how we love to think of ourselves as oh-so-tolerant and open-minded. There’s also a related phenomenon where some younger Norwegians are so immersed in the American internet they start identifying to a worrying degree with American politics and the US culture war, which also leads to a certain “Americanization” of our domestic politics. So all in all I guess “deeply ambivalent” would be a fair summary of how the US is viewed here IMO, with a lot of open contempt and snobbery towards the Red Tribe.
“But the commitment to these things has also taken on a religious fervor. They want to totally replace fossil fuels and actually believe that we can maintain the standards of living they are accustomed to in what must necessarily be a much lower energy society. And I’ve tried to point out to these people why it will not work;”
No kidding. 3300 MW of installed wind plus solar and what does the green line in my favorite graph show for yesterday? (July 20)
https://transmission.bpa.gov/business/operations/wind/baltwg.aspx
Calm winds and a forest fire (correction several forest fires) in Oregon really can cause problems on the grid.
https://fires.cornea.is/state/oregon
Martin B. # 310:
“None of our scrapped lithium-ion batteries go to landfilling, and 100% are recycled.”
I think it’s a wishful thiking, and a quite good PR example; but in real world, I doubt 100% of those batteries parts and metal can be full recycled. A small part of them probably is lost during process (enthropy law rules).
—————————————————————
JMG # 325 and Gnat:
“It’s crucial to realize that Marxism is a secular religion masquerading as a rational ideology”
Well, it’s and old story: Mr. Popper pointed during past century that Marxist theory about a few “historical laws” which explained every historic event in past, and even worse, allowed to know the future (Socialist and then Communist Utopia, of course) were “non falsable” hypothesis, so they weren’t science, but ideology/belief. And a very reductionist and near conspiratorial one…It’s a pity too many “serious” historians in the past century despised, for example, Toynbee and Spengler theories of History, running like moths toward a light, into the Marxist fake historican/economical science. By the way, Popper debunking of Marxism as a scientific (?) theory was published in 1945 (“Open Society and Its Enemies”), but USSR collapse happened near 50 years after that event (I mean, the true event which confirmed Marxism was counterfactual with History).
On the other hand, mild Social-democratic governments in European democratic countries have ruled quite well those societies for a while; but of course, this kind of Socialism isn’t the Marxist one (there’s a life outside the Commies ideas in the left side of politics, methink).
———————————————-
Paedrig # 359:
“Even as we ramp up aggression against Iran again, Trump is pulling all our troops out of Iraq! And considering leaving Syria and Lebanon!”
I’m puzzled, those news aren’t in my country MSM…
Taking on account Trump loves to perform the “crazy man” strategy since his first mandate, it wouldn’t be strange as work hypothesis, that was a bluff for inner/geopolitical motives (which only the POTUS and his advisors know now). Or maybe you’re right, but I can tell you it’s better to not mistake wishes with the possible near future. Let’s wait to see what hypothesis is right (or even maybe there’s a third explanation for that).
——————————————————————-
Deneb # 378:
“they were subsumed into the green energy and climate change agendas, e.g. large-scale bureaucratic initiatives with themselves as the main beneficiaries of such policies. But the commitment to these things has also taken on a religious fervor. They want to totally replace fossil fuels and actually believe that we can maintain the standards of living they are accustomed to in what must necessarily be a much lower energy society.”
After having read your depiction of proposals made by that thing that is self-labelled as the “Left”, more or less extended across every Western country nowadays; I’ve thought fast in the UN Agenda 2030, an embarrassing PR exercise to make happy green/leftists for a while (until 2030 arrives and none of those wisful thinking goals won’t be fullfilled). Do you thought in that controversial and void UN writing when you wrote that paragraph?
————————————————-
And finally, an apparently silly comment about World Cup end. By the way, I don’t like very much soccer, but I evidently like Spain team won…
A day or two before the final match, some LLMs here were asked (like oracles, ahem) about which team would win the match, Argentina or Spain. Most LLMs pointed Spain had a slight advantage over Argentina, les than 60%. After the Spanish victory, LLM believers said machines were right, so let’s go with usual and boring LLMs tryumphalism…Oh wait!
According soccer “connoisseurs” with whom I had a talk in my favorite cafeteria the day before the match, Spain team had more options to win than Argentina, because Spaniards game style was more technical and smart than Argentinians showed. Indeed, Argentina was hiding its lower technical level in its game, under its fig leaf of “juego canchero”, an euphemism to depict its players dirty (and aggresive) game. You could compare the two different game styles during all the World Cup previous matches.
So, if some human brains can grasp who was likely going to win the 2026 World Football/Soccer Cup, I can tell you we don’t really need a lot of energy-intensive energy consumption machines, to guess soccer results, nor anything more human minds can do.
Been watching this one for several years. The use of new drilling technologies to access geothermal energy to make 24/7 electricity anywhere in the world instead of just the spots where earth heat happens to be closer to the surface as in Iceland. For instance they are hoping to drill near let’s say a power plant using natural gas to heat water to spin the turbines and then easily switch over the plant to geothermal.. of course this hope even if successful won’t power jets, ocean freighters, heavy mining earth moving equipment and certain industrial processes using fossil fuels.
Behind a paywall. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2533209-how-to-unlock-unlimited-geothermal-energy-anywhere-we-want/
Quaise Energy mentioned is one of the geothermal drilling start ups, has a moth balled power plant in New York State they are planning to re-activate with geothermal as proof of concept.
Atmosferic#382
Acording with my experience heath pumps are useless when the temperature is inferior to 5 degrees Celsius.
Denizen @ 388, would the three various religious identities of three small Baltic countries be a result of the cuius regio, eius religio settlement?
@Atmospheric River #382…that’s the problem with text; I was trying to show skepticism toward the argument I was describing, apparently without success. My own situation is that I have a condensing gas furnace in the basement and two electric cars in the carport. In the event of a power failure, I can keep the refrigerator and furnace running for a couple of days and be quite comfortable. If I had a heat pump, I’d need a generator – a BIG generator. (I also have a wood stove which I mostly use to burn the branches that drop off my trees, but I have proven that in a pinch it will keep the house from freezing.)
@Mary Bennet #329: Here’s hoping! Thanks for the message and for your perspective. I missed a lot of the background on that.
Siliconguy 338
> As to speeds on gravel roads, that depends on how bad the washboarding happens to be. 65 is no problem on a good gravel road. 30 might still be too fast on a washboarded one. Yes you can go fast enough on a washboarded road to only hit the tops and get a reasonably smooth ride, but you can only steer when the tires are in contact with the road.
Oh, but Captain James T Klirk is going to save us (and other saviors like him). Within the next ten years, ‘they’ will design and build a car that floats over roads, barely touching the road, don’t-chah-know, and be so cheap that every adult will be able to afford one, and mechanics‘ cost will be negligible.
Don’t-chah-know?
💨🛟🚘💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
To get back to another thread in this discussion – There has been a lot to say about the childish, irresponsible Boomers who grew up with coonskin caps and hula hoops. Down here, while there are also a lot of the clueless privileged, obviously, there’s an entirely different contingent whose experience was that of fighting in the biggest, nastiest, most impossible no-win war since the trenches of the First World War. And have the scars and memories to prove it.
The late, unlamented Philip Wylie write, in the late 1940s, that WWII was the only war which produced no songs, as opposed to everything from the American Revolution on up. Well, a lot of songs came out of nightmare of Vietnam, and they were bitter. Ask any of their veterans who wear the cap. Of course, after the trenches, came the so-called Lost Generation whose poetry tells the same story. And WWI was not up against what was not only the Communist Viet Cong, but included what reads like the sort of all-out insurgency described in Retropia – you couldn’t trust anybody not to be on the other side, from what I’ve read. And then they came home to find the hula-hoop-and love-beads group calling them names.
My family got off lightly. The only one who served was my brother, and he was in a ship off the Gulf of Tonkin.
Tim Watkins has a new article up concerning energy: https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2026/07/21/a-brief-interlude/
Sounds like he and you, JMG, are sharing many of the same observations AND at the same time.
We did it in elementary school in the 1950s, but we may have to start practicing it again: “Duck and Cover.” But instead of a short sharp flash, the force bearing down on us is much more deliberative…
Scotlyn #318
I think there is an aspect that many people do not consider in the shooting of vehicle drivers who have weilded thier vehicles as weapons, as Rene Good did (intentionally or not) , and that is intent. Should the officer be required, in real time, to intuit the continuing intent of someone who has just commited an assault against them with a deadly weapon ( she did hit the man!)? What else would have stopped Rene from putting the vehicle in reverse and taking another pass at the officer and/or his fellow officers? In the mement, she had just proven that she was willing and capable of doing so. Should the officiers have to endure an ongoing deadly risk, and why should they?
Arcane Archivist : RE: AI Mathematical proof. What actually happened is that an AI system allegedly found a counterexample to a conjecture. But no one’s asked (AFAIK) this question: Is that mathematical proof worth the financial investment that went into it? As long as new mathematical proofs are ways for aspiring college professors to show that they’re trying, then let them do it, but it’s not as if these proofs are going to have much benefit for the investing class.
@ Gnat RE : Marxism
I always find it odd that it is named directly off Karl Marx, Communism is at least descriptive. Marxism is just that, to turn the works of one man into an -Ism, it almost isn’t about the ideas but the man himself. About a month back I went through the book ‘Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth’ by Kohei Saito. I said it then, the first 3rd is actually alright at summarizing the problems with the ‘solutions’ most people provide, but as soon as he starts talking directly about Marx directly, it reads like a religious text. “Karl said this so it must be true!”. There are elements of communist theory that may be adaptable for a future in decline but just taking Marx’s word as the indisputable means of making it happen, it is just dooming it to failure.
Marx is worth while looking into but keeping at an arms length. Some reasonable ideas especially in term of criticism of how markets can become twisted against the people, but there is a lot more silly ideas on how to address those problems.
Hi John Michael,
Man, I know it’s late in the weekly cycle, but you are going to love this quote: JP Morgan claimed the company’s “impact on humanity would be bigger than we’ve ever seen”. (referring to the behemoth Space X)
Prepare for stock market pain as China throws a spanner into AI boom
I know what they’re talking about, but that same quote can also mean the exact polar opposite, and it’d still use the same words. 😉 Oh my gawds!
Cheers
Chris
Today’s Ground newsletter is really a collection of stories about US decline.
https://ground.news/newsletters/blindspot-report/Jul-21-2026
U.S. viewed less favourably than China by Canadians, new poll suggests
Feds advance plan to open 2,800 acres of Ohio’s Wayne National Forest to fracking
Confidence in US institutions mired near record low: Gallup
Mamdani makes NYC cash-for-syringes program permanent after pilot
Iran’s IRGC claims attack on Amazon’s main data hub in Bahrain
US imposes new 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian products
None of them suggest that America is becoming great again. All empires decline, some go reluctantly but more-or-less gracefully, like UK after 1945-56, and others go desperate and flailing, like Portugal after 1945. Others fight for a bit, then have what we Aussies call a dummy spit and walk off, like the French 1954-63. I’m getting the feeling the US is like the French. Which would make sense historically for a lot of reasons.
Denizen, the rise in stock prices from 2009 on didn’t take on the morphology of a speculative bubble until fairly recently. There are many forms of unsustainable growth in notional prices, and a speculative bubble is only one of them. As for why it hasn’t burst sooner, once you ask “why,” you’re talking causality. It hasn’t burst like a speculative bubble because it didn’t have the morphological characteristics of a speculative bubble, of which bursting is one.
Cugel, that strikes me as a fair assessment! I see the obsession with AI as a desperate Hail Mary approach — if only we had machines that are smarter than we are, they could tell us how to get out of the problem that we’ve worked so hard to create for ourselves! If (as seems very unlikely) all these data centers could be built and powered, and (as seems even more unlikely) the result is artificial general intelligence (AGI), it strikes me as far more likely that the machines will look over the situation and say, “Well, if you’d started to decrease fossil fuel dependence in the 1970s and kept at it, you could have avoided disaster, but at this point it’s much too late. Sorry.”
Denizen, because that’s not the way that past speculative bubbles have ended. You’re still not getting it, are you? I wrote about this a while back…
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-04/a-peculiar-absence-of-bellybones/
Bryan, thanks for this.
Chris, Robert E. Howard is certainly a far better source of insight into the current speculative boom than most financial writers just now. Conan the Stock Analyst? It almost works… 😉 As for private credit, that whole sector has been in serious trouble for a while now, one more canary in the coal mine.
Etienne, I’m simply taking your prime minister at his word:
https://fortune.com/2026/06/13/canadian-prime-minister-mark-carney-new-world-order-european-union-us-vs-middle-powers/
Paedrig, the withdrawal of US troops from the Middle East is to my mind the real story. US global hegemony was never going to last much longer anyway, and it’s a very Trumpian move to pummel Iran with bombs as a distraction while that process unfolds.
Alan, it’s a very hopeful sign that this sort of talk is starting to be heard again.
Denizen, many thanks for the data points!
Jessica, I don’t see the EU elites as a comprador class. I see them as trying to emerge from under the shadow of US hegemony and pursue their own geopolitical ambitions.
Justin, “the statistical analysis of datasets back into sludge” strikes me as both very evocative and very accurate. As more and more public policy and corporate decisionmaking is based on the resulting sludge, things may get very colorful.
Martin, hmm! That’s fascinating. I don’t know of an astrological cycle that recurs at exact 40 year intervals, though.
Clay, a few months ago I was talking with a friend who retired from the Navy after a good many years, and he had some very lively things to say about the LCSs, which Navy enlisted men call the Little Crappy Ships. If these new nuclear reactors are built to those standards, stand by for meltdowns!
Siliconguy, there was a huge canal boom and it involved dozens of canals.
MindWinds, thanks for the heads up about Phoenix Energy! The sound you hear in the distance is a klaxon warning that we’re now on track for a robust speculative crash.
Johnny, yes, and in fact I have a tape deck and 30-odd cassettes. I’ve been delighted to see that medium come back into use. A very funny meme is about to become obsolete…
Pygmycory, I’m sure that’s exactly what’s going on.
Martin, he was right, of course.
Deneb, no argument there. For the last decade or more, I think, it’s only on the personal and local scale that there’s been much chance of doing anything at all, because so many people have embraced a set of beliefs about the future that guarantee a disastrous collective response on any larger scale, and those beliefs are not rationally held. They’re articles of blind faith, and the more completely they fail to work, the more passionately their believers cling to them. Nothing new in that — look up the history of the Ghost Dance sometime — but it’s grim to watch it unfold.
Arcane, and of course solving a “major math problem” doesn’t do anything about the far more concrete and pressing problems that AI is causing, or at least not helping at all…
Rita, I heard a lot of stories like that when I was young and got to listen to old people talk. Thanks for the reminder.
BorealBear, thanks for the data point!
BeardTree, yep. That’s another project that’s been about to happen since the 1970s. There are a few places where geothermal energy is viable, but not many.
Patricia, I’ve noticed very consistently that the boomers who embody the characteristics that so many younger people object to are precisely those that used middle-class dodges to stay out of Nam. There may be a lesson there…
Bryan, good to see this. Thanks for the heads up.
Chris, ha! Yeah, “impact” is not necessarily something to look forward to.
Warburton, I think you’re probably right. Pity so few Americans would get it if I noted that this Iran business now is our Algerian war.
Patricia Matthews
At least two songs spring to mind from WWII: a British marching song to the tune of Col. Bogey that starts Hitler,he only has one ball, and an American one by Burle Ives called Roger Young about a hero in the Pacific. There were plenty of Russian ones. Lilli Marlene pre dated the war, but was very popular amongst German soldiers. I bet there were more. There were songs from the LIncoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War.
Stephen
“Tyler Durden” of Zerohedge has referenced your essay from June on the class reshuffle happening under the cover of AI, and added his own interpretation. You may see an uptick in traffic.
https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/conflicts-brewing-americas-ten-classes
JMG 405
> canals: aha, slowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch…
Over the decades (yeah, it has been at least twenty years), a couple times a year, usually a young man in his 20s, will ask here something like, “I see what is coming. It is all bad. What do I do? Where do I go?”
The question hasn’t come up lately but it does come up often enough that I now wrote it out to use each time. Here is my stock answer:
Move to where nearby there is the following:
north (default-ed-ly cool);
fertile farmland;
right on a canal;
near a town that supports the fixing of canal boat either sails, or engines, or both; and
there are places on the main drag for an old-timey general store (like on 1960s and 1970s’ Gunsmoke; Bonanza; Little House on the Prairie; The Waltons).
These are four sources of occupation and income in one place. Don’t ask about timing. Details one works out on one’s own.
Head for a working-class skilled trade, preferably having apprenticed.
💨🪴🦦🛶🛠️🥫✋🏼🔢💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@ Selkirk # 400
Thank you. As you say, “intention” is the main theme being debated in this topic. I am unable to join in discussions of intent, because intentions are always – to me at least – a very tightly closed book. I really have zero idea how to perceive, assess or judge intentions. Even my own! 😉
So, again, thank you. But, sadly, you are addressing my blind spot.
” I don’t see the EU elites as a comprador class. I see them as trying to emerge from under the shadow of US hegemony and pursue their own [diverse and conflicting] geopolitical ambitions.”
And of course it is that pre-existing, but long suppressed, divergence and conflict which is bound to splinter the EU into pieces over the next few decades, since the EU’s unity was so largely a product of US dominated NATO and the US led post-war “rules based order”…
“…emerging from the shadow of US hegemony” is (to me) exactly the same thing as emerging from reasons for European unity to continue.
I used to work at a hedge fund, and our theory as to why the speculative bubble hasn’t burst yet is because the market is inherently different in three ways:
1. Lots of people’s retirement accounts are hooked into the stock market in “low-risk” assets which basically invest in the S&P 500. That props up the stock market directly, as institutional investors are much slower to move money compared to rich individuals and speculators.
2. A lot of the retail “investors” out there treat the stock market like lottery tickets and stay in the market regardless of how much money they lose. Regulators have successfully turned the stock market into a casino, which also props up the stock market.
3. Guaranteed Government intervention have people less spooked than before. The expectation is that there’s a flow at which point taxpayers save everyone.
Hello Robert Mathiesen (and Etienne),
Thank you for your response, Robert. I did not realize that the people of Lithuania remained pagan so late into history since Christ.
Can you provide a similar historical sketch of the peoples of Latvia and Estonia?
Also, how do all these considerations affect the line of religious division between Catholicism and Orthodoxy that you and Etienne were speaking of?
Like the genocide and mass-deportation of millions of German-speaking peoples from Eastern European countries after World War II, along a roughly parallel line but somewhat west of the one we are speaking of, this Catholic-Orthodox boundary has, I am dimly aware, been the arena for countless atrocities in the name of the Christian religion over the centuries, as I am ashamed to acknowledge.
So I think the question of affixing its exact contours is of some historical importance. Who knows, maybe it is even of substantial contemporary importance, given the war in the Ukraine, the ongoing conflict between the modern incarnation of the Roman Empire in its Eastern (i.e., Russian) and Western halves, etc.
JMG, with your permission, I may post this again the next time you cover something that is tangentially germane in your main post, since it may not be seen and responded to now.
Hello JMG,
Thank you for your responses.
I don’t think it is a matter of my not getting it. It is ultimately a matter, I think, of our disagreeing over whether it is meaningful and worthwhile to take up questions of cause and effect even in the context of complex realities that lend themselves more easily to morphological analyses than they do to causal analyses, given our limited epistemic perspectives. I maintain that it is worthwhile, whereas you maintain that it is not.
I look forward to exploring our polite but fundamental disagreement about this further as you proceed with your series of posts on Peak Oil, which I am obviously following with great interest. I think we will both learn a lot from one another in the process.
Scotlyn, thank you for your gracious reply to my (in hindsight) ranckled take on seeing the incident portrayed as potentially a murder. I think that the same rush to judgement occurs with regard to “intent” whenever an armed suspects are “shot in the back”, as if that is *all* you needed to know about the situation. Maybe they were running away, or perhaps the suspect was retreating to cover to advantageously prosecute the gunfight? There are *so many* situations of this sort, the totality of circumstances need always be considered. I’m eternally grateful that my police officer grandfather managed to come home every night. It is my acknowledged bias that I don’t think the violent crimanals he dealt with deserved the benefit of the doubt when it came to putting his life in danger.