Today’s guest post is by Hideaway, the originator of Complexity Theory, the only new idea in the study of human overshoot since Varki’s MORT 10 years ago.
For those who have not followed Hideaway at Peak Oil Barrel or here at un-Denial, Complexity Theory argues that any species that is dependent on any non-renewable resource must grow or it will collapse, because as a resource depletes the quality of its reserves declines, which requires increasing complexity and energy for extraction to maintain the flow of supply, and increasing complexity requires a growing population, because each brain can manage a finite level of complexity, which requires a growing supply of resources to support the growing population, and because recycling non-renewable minerals without losses is impossible, and since the energy that supply chains depend on is mostly non-renewable, a point is eventually reached where the complexity of supply chains must break down, and the species returns to a state that is not dependent on non-renewable resources, which for humans is a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Complexity Theory, if true, is important because it implies any plan to mitigate the effects of human overshoot like climate change, species extinction, pollution, or resource scarcity, with population reduction policies, or a steady-state economy using a full-reserve asset-backed monetary system, or voluntary degrowth, or balanced budgets, will cause a reduction of complexity, and therefore the population and its lifestyle that depends on growing complexity for resources will collapse, possibly quite quickly due to the many self-reinforcing feedback loops in supply chains, and the extreme level of current human complexity and overshoot.
In today’s post Hideaway focusses on a quality of energy that is required to support complexity, Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI).
“EROEI is the ratio of the amount of usable energy (the exergy) delivered from a particular energy resource to the amount of exergy used to obtain that energy resource.” – Wikipedia
For anyone new to the concept of EROEI, here is a simple way to visualize it. Imagine we discovered an oil field with a gigantic quantity oil but it was so deep that the machines used to drill and pump the oil burned all of the oil obtained. This energy source has an EROEI of 1.0, because energy obtained equals energy used, which means it contributes nothing to civilization (except pollution), and will not be exploited for long because oil companies cannot make a profit.
Any useful energy source must have an EROEI higher than 1.
Most advocates of non-fossil energy believe it has a plenty high EROEI and therefore we can and should transition from burning fossil energy. Hideaway here calculates that their EROEI assumptions are far too optimistic.
Hideaway has spent several years patiently trying to educate and persuade dozens of alternate energy advocates, with, as far as I can tell, zero success. I believe this is yet more evidence that Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT theory is correct because energy experts are plenty smart enough to understand Hideaway’s calculations, yet are incapable of doing so.
Given that Hideaway’s Complexity Theory predicts we will soon collapse no matter what we do, why is the truth about EROEI important? Because if Hideaway is correct and non-fossil energy is not making enough net contribution to our civilization, then subsidizing and prioritizing non-fossil energy will increase the rate of depletion of non-renewable resources, which will reduce the time to collapse, and probably worsen the pollution and ecosystem destruction our descendent hunter-gatherers must cope with. In other words, using non-fossil energy will worsen the problems their advocates are trying to solve.
Truth here therefore is a big deal.
Hideaway should be commended for the significant original research he did here.
His conclusion sheds light on why everything seems to be breaking all at once now, and why our leaders are obsessively fixated on regime changing Russia and Iran, two of the very few remaining big sources of exportable oil.
A few years ago, when I couldn’t get a mining project to work economically by using just renewables for the power source, despite the claims of “renewables” being the cheapest form of electricity, I knew I had to go and find out what I was missing. Using diesel to generate electricity at remote mine sites is extremely expensive, so if there was any truth in renewables being “cheaper”, it should be validated at remote mine sites.
I searched for every document I could find about how EROEI was worked out and found many documents discussing great EROEI for renewables, but precious little on how much energy went into building solar panels, wind turbines, or batteries. If I traced far enough back to references of references, I eventually found some numbers, but mostly just plucked out of the air with some basic calculations on Aluminium production and glass production, with a few about silicon wafer production and the energy used in the processes alone.
Even the nuclear industry had a way they worked out their often touted 100 to 1 energy return on investment. The following is from the World Nuclear Association, quoted!!
“Peterson et al (2005) have presented materials figures for four reactor types:
- Generation II PWR of 1000 MWe: 75 m3 concrete and 36 t steel per MWe.
- ABWR of 1380 MWe: 191,000 m3 concrete, 63,440 t metal – 138 m3 concrete and 46 t metal/MWe.
- EPR of 1600 MWe: 204,500 m3 concrete, 70,900 t metal – 128 m3 concrete and 44.3 t metal/MWe.
- ESBWR of 1500 MWe: 104,000 m3 conc, 50,100 t metal – 69 m3 concrete and 33 t metal/MWe.
The AP1000 is similar to the ESBWR per MWe but no actual data is given.
Using gross energy requirement figures of 50 GJ/t for steel or 60 GJ/t for metal overall, 1.5 GJ/t or 3 GJ/m3 for pure concrete, this data converts to:
- Generation II PWR needs: 225 GJ concrete + 2160 GJ metal/MWe = 2.3 PJ/GWe.
- ABWR needs: 414 GJ concrete + 2760 GJ metal/MWe = 3.2 PJ/GWe.
- EPR needs: 384 GJ concrete + 2658 GJ metal/MWe = 3.0 PJ/GWe.
- ESBWR needs: 207 GJ concrete + 1980 GJ metal/MWe = 2.2 PJ/GWe.
In common with other studies the inputs are all in primary energy terms, joules, and any electrical inputs are presumed to be generated at 33% thermal efficiency.
The figures now in Table 1 for plant construction and operation, and also for decommissioning, are from Weissbach et al (2013) adjusted for 1 GWe. They are slightly higher than the above estimates, but much lower than earlier published US figures (ERDA 76-1). Our fuel input figures are 60% higher than Weissbach. Hence our EROI is 70, compared with 105 in that study.”
My way of thinking is that if you dump 191,000 tonnes of concrete and 63,440 tonnes of metals, mostly steel with ‘some’ copper, aluminium, etc. all together in a pile somewhere, it does not materialize into a ABWR nuclear power plant all by itself. All the bits and pieces need to be carefully constructed into very certain shapes and combinations, plus built in the correct order to become a nuclear power plant, therefore their calculations had to be horribly wrong!
If we dumped that quantity of those materials, in there correct shapes, onto the North Sentinal Island where some of the most isolated primitive humans exist, would they turn it into a nuclear power plant? The answer is obviously also NO!!
What if we left a very specific set of written instructions for those people? Again NO as they do not know how to read, nor do any calculations.
How about leaving the cement, reinforcing steel, gravel, sand, and all the instructions of how to put it all together to make concrete in some sign language form, to just make the foundations? Once again NO. How do you give instructions for just the right consistency, or to get all air bubbles out, or to work the surface correctly when in the setting process? You can’t, it only comes from experience of working with concrete.
Even if we had a group of knowledgeable teenagers, who could read and follow instructions, would we get them to be totally responsible for the foundations of a nuclear power plant? Again NO, as we need engineers and experienced concreters to build something that will last decades and is highly dangerous with failure of something like the foundations of the reactor chamber.
From this line of thinking, extended to solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, geothermal, plus even oil , gas and coal, there has to be an inclusion of all the energy inputs, which includes the education of the people involved in construction and operation, as well as all the energy inputs to the trucks, bridges, ports, mines, roads to mines, etc., etc., that all have to exist for building of anything to be possible. We only have one possible way to include all the inputs, money, or the cost of building and operating any form of energy source.
Money, or cost is certainly not going to be a perfect way to work out the Energy cost of building anything, plus it needs to be compared to something to come to a conclusion about the EROEI.
Firstly, we know that fossil fuels certainly can or could provide the net energy for everything else in a modern civilization, from the simple fact that modern civilization exists at all, at least for ‘most’ in the developed countries.
As the price for every energy supply appears to be different all over the world and different for each type of energy, I decided to look at the wholesale price or cost of energy at the world’s manufacturing hub of South/East Asia as a starting point. The question is over what period? Going back to 2012 the average price of crude oil was often over $100/bbl, while in March 2020 it was $16/bbl.
Should the price be from a single year when a solar panel factory starts production, or should it be over the years when the factory was built?
Should it be when the adults who are working in the factory were at school, or perhaps when the engineers, accountants, lawyers and managers were at university?
Maybe it should be when the mine providing the silicon was established, or the ships and ports where they load and unload were built? OK no easy answer at all.
Anyway, I decided to look at the average wholesale price of energy in different forms over the last decade (from 2013- 2023) as it encompassed times of higher and lower wholesale energy prices. What surprised me most was that oil, gas and metallurgical coal all had around the same average wholesale price over that period of around $US43/MWh, with thermal coal cheaper. It was cheap enough that the wholesale price of electricity in Asia during this period was also around the $US40/MWh.*
*Of course there are variations from year to year and from one location to another, but interestingly when I worked out the average price for oil over the prior decade 2003-2012 is was also around the same number, roughly $70/bbl that corresponds with around $41/MWh for the energy content using 1.7MWh/bbl.
Once I had a base number it was fairly easy to just compare the total lifetime cost, both capital and operating and maintenance cost of any energy producer back to how much energy was produced.
I decided to use $US40/MWh as the average wholesale cost of energy for every type of energy producer, as the base for the capital, operating and maintenance costs over the lifetime of operation. This cost to build and operate the plant can then be compared to the total lifetime output for that plant. The actual base number doesn’t really matter as I’ll explain towards the end of this article.
For our purposes here is a simplistic example. If an oil well returned $400 worth of energy over it’s lifetime, while only costing $40 worth of energy in total, to build and operate, then the EROEI was 10/1. As in it cost 1MWh of energy and returned 10mWh of energy, in this case oil.
I had no idea at all about what type of results this form of calculation would give me, or if it would be close to the often touted 10 or 20 to 1 returns that are needed for modern civilization to exist, until I worked out as much as possible.
I was not interested in theoretical cost, I wanted actual existing examples so I could compare different energy delivery types. Finding the actual numbers proved a lot more difficult than I expected. All over the place are headlines of a new development with an expected cost of $XYZ. Often though, the completed cost was vastly different to ‘expected’ capital cost. Then there was also operating and maintenance costs which many projects are very coy about, again giving some expected costs, with nothing about actual operating costs released, this depended upon the energy source.
For some like the nuclear industry, it’s fairly easy to find average O&M costs from public companies or industry announcements. The nuclear industry reports this for US reactors, with the average being around the $30/MWh as per World Nuclear Association (includes fuel costs).*
*Anyone paying attention can immediately see that in a world of $40/MWh energy cost an O&M cost of $30/MWh means that this form of energy cannot deliver a 10/1 ratio of EROEI. It’s 1.33/1 before including any capital costs.
OK, here are some examples of what I came up with…
A relatively new coal fired power plant in Queensland Australia, that was a highly efficient design, based on super critical operating temperatures, situated right next to the coal mine, where they dig the coal themselves, so no “price” paid for coal, had an EROEI of only 5.09/1.
This coal power station cost $US750M to build, including all the costs associated with the coal mine and conveyor system (4km), with an operating cost of around $US4.68/MWh for staff and sustaining capital.
Assuming the lifespan to be 40 years then over the plant and coal mine life of 40 years at a 90% capacity factor, it will produce 750Mw X 24hrs X 365 days X 40 years X 0.9 capacity factor. = 236,520,000MWh of electricity into the grid.
Total cost of capital plus O&M over this lifetime = $US750,000,000 + 236,520,000 X $US4.68 = $1,856,913,600 or $7.85/Mwh, giving an EROEI of $40/7.85 = 5.09/1.
The overall formula is adding all costs in $US to keep everything consistent, then divide by the $40/MWh average cost of wholesale energy over the last decade or so. Then compare the cost to build and operate in MWh with the total MWh the plant will produce over it’s lifetime of operation.
Using exactly the same method, I came up with an EROEI of a new gas well, connected to the system and paying their share of O&M to the pipeline authority in Western Australia of 23/1. The capital cost of drilling 2 wells and building a simple processing plant, plus joining up to the main gas pipeline, plus the fees to pipeline operator comes to a total cost of $US25,750,000, while the return is 15,000,000 MWh of gas delivered to customers.
In Saudi Arabia there are still old wells that have a total capital plus operating and maintenance cost of $2.5/bbl. That comes out to an EROEI of 27/1. These are the old legacy wells drilled decades ago and still flowing well. The Saudi’s also have newer wells at a much lower EROEI, yet I can’t get data on this of actual costs.
The New England Solar Farm in northern NSW, is still being built at a capital cost of around $US858M for a 720 MW plant, an expected life of 25 years with an expected capacity of 5.5 hours/d on average. It also has 400MWh of battery storage, or about 35 minutes at the rated capacity. In terms of O&M costs in solar circles I’ve seen 1% of capital costs as the base used for the first decade, with costs expected to be 2-3% of capital costs thereafter. I’ve used a constant 1.5% of capital cost as the basis for my calculations.
1% of Capital cost of $858M = $8.58M X1.5 O&M X 25 yrs = $321,750,000. Add capital cost of $858M = $1,179,750,000. Divide by cost of energy $40/MWh = 29,493,750 MWh.
How much electricity will the plant produce over it’s life 720MW X 5.5Hrs/d X 365d/y X 25 Yrs = 36,135,000MWh ..or an EROEI of 1.22/1.
A wind farm near me of 132MW capacity, at a capital cost of $US193,000,000 and an expected O&M cost of $7.53/MWh, with expected production of 7,227,000 MWH over it’s life expectancy of 25 years. It was meant to have a capacity factor of 37% but has been running well below that at only 25% capacity, which is the number I’ve used. I’ve also noticed that fairly often during the day when I pass it, even with a good breeze, it’s often mostly stopped, and when I check the wholesale price at the time, it’s negative, meaning they deliberately shutdown the plant to avoid a cost to send electricity into the grid.
Anyway cost of $193,000,000 + 7,227,000MWh X $7.53/MW = $US247,419,310 lifetime cost. Divide by $40/MWh = 6,185,482MWh to build. The EROEI is 7,227,000MWH divided by 6,185,482MWh = 1.17/1.
Hinkley Point C nuclear plant with a latest estimation of $62,000,000,000 capital cost, an output of 1,564,185,600 MWh over a 60 year lifespan plus the same O&M costs of $30/MWh as in the US NPP fleet, works out with the following… 62B + 1,564,185,600hrs X 30/MWh = $108,925,568,000 lifetime cost, divided by $40/MWh = 2,723,139,200MWh to build while producing only 1,564,185,600MWh of electricity over 60 years or an EROEI of 0.57/1. In other words less energy produced than went into building and operating it!! (assuming there is any accuracy in the methodologies ‘cost to build’)
For curiosity I worked out a fracked well based on some industry numbers from D Coyne and others on the Peak Oil Barrel web page. Assuming the capital cost of the older wells was around the $US10,000,000 plus O&M costs averaging $US12/bbl, and a return over first 120 months (10 years) of 375,000bbls oil equivalent, then the cost is $10,000,000 + 375,000 X $12 = $US14,500,000. Divide by $40/Mwh = 362,500MWh for a return of 375,000 bbls which equals 375,000 X 1.7MWh.bbl = 637,500MWh. The EROEI is therefore 637,500MWH divided by 362,500MWh cost or 1.76/1.
Assuming the wholesale price of energy was a too low a number to use in the first place, because only the largest businesses pay this cheap price, while all the people involved in every aspect of their daily lives have to pay a much higher retail price, what does it do to all the EROEIs shown?
Lets take a quick example using a cost of energy as $80/MWh instead of the $40/MWh of the approximate wholesale price of energy to reflect the ‘retail’ costs people actually pay.
In the first very simple example we had an oil well that cost 1MWh of oil energy to build and returned 10Mwh of oil energy. In that case the energy cost was $40/MWH.
Let’s double the energy cost to the more realistic $80/MWh cost. However it still only cost $40 to build and operate, all we changed was the base price of energy we use to $80/MWh. It’s now only costing 0.5MWh of energy to build and still returning 10MWh of oil energy so the EROEI has gone up to 20/1.
Exactly the same happens to all the EROEI numbers we worked out, they all doubled. The ratio between any of the energy producers stayed the same. In fact we could use whatever number we liked for the overall energy cost, it’s just the EROEI numbers that change, but are always related back to each other.
In summary, assuming the original $40/MWh wholesale cost of energy, and $80/MWh for comparison, we get the following EROEIs:
| $40/MWh | $80/MWH | |
| Kogan Creek coal power station | 5.09 | 10.18 |
| Old Saudi oil wells | 27 | 54 |
| Permian fracked oil wells ~2015 | 1.76 | 3.52 |
| NESF Solar Farm | 1.22 | 2.44 |
| MTG Wind Farm | 1.17 | 2.34 |
| WA gas wells | 23 | 46 |
| Hinkley Point C nuclear | 0.57 | 1.14 |
None of the new energy types, including nuclear give us anything like the 10-20 EROEI that’s needed for modern civilisation to operate, yet the older fossil fuel plants have given us a much higher numbers on average well in excess of what’s often cited as the required EROEI.
Taking another new coal mine, the Leer South one in W Virginia USA, has a resource of 200,000,000 tonnes of metallurgical coal at an energy content of 8.33MWh/tonne. So the return for this new mine is around 1,666,000,000MWh in total over decades. The capital cost was around $380,000,000 and operating cost of $72.49/tonne. This works out at an EROEI of around 4.48 at the $40/MWh rate or 8.96 at the $80/Mwh rate for energy cost of building and operating the mine.
This mine and the Kogan Creek coal fired power station I mentioned earlier are both late coal developments, not considered viable in earlier times when easier to obtain coal resources were available. It’s the same with the fracked oil from the Permian, only left until recently as the energy prices were too low for them to be considered. The Leer South mine has seams of coal 2-3.5 metres in thickness with waste between the seams and between layers in the seams. Likewise for Kogan Creek.
These are not the thick, easy to mine types of coal deposits we built civilization with 50-100 years ago, so have a much lower EROEI than the easy to get and now depleted coal from around the world. Yet both are decent EROEIs at the $40/MWh cost and much higher EROEIs than any of the newer energy producers.
In conclusion, it should be obvious to everyone that any energy producing facility that costs a total of under $US26M over it’s lifetime (the small gas field in WA) and delivers 15,000,000MWh has a far better return under any metric than one that delivers only 7,227,000MWh (and intermittently at that), the Mt Gellibrand Wind Farm for a total lifetime cost of over $US247M.
All the ‘costs’ associated with any of energy producers are spent by the providers of the goods and services to build and operate the plants. People spend the money they earn working on these things, on food, heating their houses, cooling their houses, getting to work, their kid’s education and food, holidays, etc., the list is endless. Yet every single cent spent by anyone in the chain anywhere has an energy cost associated with it somewhere. Spending over $US247M must have a much higher background energy cost than something only costing under $US26M.
Understanding this cost difference, then comparing just these raw numbers to countless research papers that try to make out that wind farms have a better EROEI than the gas wells/plant costing only 10% overall, yet producing more than double the energy, has to make you think we are just deluding ourselves.
I know my numbers and methodology are far from perfect, yet they seem a lot more honest in comparing differences between the various energy providers and clearly show we have trouble ahead as the older much higher EROEI type energy producers are rapidly declining. These older types, even in the fossil fuel domain, are clearly the most profitable ones, so humans being humans are likely to use these much faster than the newer more marginal energy sources.
“we are in the last decade of a supercycle”
David Hunter sees a stock market crash in the short term and a systemic collapse around 2033.
In contrast to Peter Schiff, who predicts that the crash will also bring down the system.
Saludos
el mar
I’m amused by analysts who see cycles in economics after observing exactly one industrial revolution, one great depression, and one all-time peak of oil production.
Kind of like the Hindus who believe in perpetual reincarnation after observing a single death.
(h/t Megacancer)
New interview with Nick Lane. He’s so good at talking about the blob.
I managed to download a NickL book, based on Rob’s recs on here – was curious but have not dived in yet – might start here instead.
Ya, Rob turned me onto Nick too.
IIRC, this one is even better… if you have 4 hours to kill.😂
Followed by the rare simultaneous evolution of an extended theory of mind with a tendency to deny unpleasant realities.
It’s a shame that an extraordinary mind like Lane’s is not aware of MORT and our overshoot predicament. But that’s what MORT predicts.
I fear that if I have grandchildren, there will be no more coral reefs left when they are alive.
Coral cover is actually increasing in the Great Barrier Reef.
https://www.aims.gov.au/monitoring-great-barrier-reef/gbr-condition-summary-2023-24
Some ‘relative’ good news, but I don’t know if that is the most up to date? their last 3 bullet points of this report most telling. As they state a few times, did not take fully into account events of early 2024 (tropical cyclones). I recall seeing the scientist Prf Terry Hughes on prime time TV in tears, around the time this came out:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/09/great-barrier-reef-coral-bleaching
And then put together with what is happening on beaches of Sth Australia…
I think the main issue is that bleaching from CC is not really happening at a pace that is destroying the reef to levels it can’t recover from.
But that just leaves us with many other ways that we can destroy it like with pesticide and fertiliser runoff. Best go see it while it looks fantastic in many places.
They mention that later in the video (I forgot the exact timestamp though).
There’s more going on in the Middle East than genocide, regime change, perfidy, and oil depletion. Water scarcity is also a growing issue.
chatGPT on Iran:
Maxojir on Iraq:
There are no words in the English language that can accurately describe how f**cked the Middle East is. I am so glad I was not born there. I will happily accept Midwestern winters over that.
Try—try—try—try—to think o’ something different. Oh—my—God—keep—me from goin’ lunatic!
Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin’ up an’ down again! There’s no discharge in the war!
Oops, sorry was I thinking out loud again?😉
I stopped watching war films a while back but that damn poem, as well as the movie ‘Threads’, have pulled me back in. Been catching up on some classics (I totally forgot how brilliant ‘Das Boot’ is). And now I’ve moved over to the obscure ones. The war genre is probably not at the top of everyone’s watch list right now, but next time you’re in the mood give this one a try. A Midnight Clear (1992) – IMDb. Full movie here:
More drama than action, but don’t let that scare you away. Made back in the golden age of independent cinema with a ridiculously good cast. It’s always been one of my favorite war films because of how much it stands out from the pack. And with the holidays coming up, it also works as a Christmastime flick.
Supposedly it’s a true story, but we all know what that usually means – Bullshit!
And check out this beautiful song that plays during the end credits. (if you recognize the artist but not sure from where, she was the mute terrorist Katya in the third Die Hard film)
Thanks. I’m adding movies to my queue faster than I can watch them. But I’m getting older and SHTF is getting closer so some day I’ll catch up.
Listening to this beautiful song now…sounds a bit like an Irish ballad.
Drew will be very stoked if I recommend an old war movie for Sat night viewing lol. He used to have a tradition of drinking and watching Saving Private Ryan every payday. I saw a few familar faces in the trailor – a young Ethan Hawke? But I don’t know if we will be able to get this one, your link does not play for me, not available in this country it says.
And while on YT in my feed I saw that Eliot Jacobsom has done a new video on:
“First Climate Tipping Point I Death of Coral Reefs I Doomsday Theorist Prof. Eliot”
As an Australian I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I have never seen the coral underwater of the Great Barrier Reef. And now it is dying and will be all gone soon.
Bummer. Not sure if this is for US only but it’s free on Tubi, Roku, Amazon, Fandango.
J. Doe here.
If you are into war stuff, I highly recommend the band Sabaton. They make metal music exclusively about real-world events related to war across human history:
About an all-female unit of Russian fighter pilots nicknamed “Nachthexen = Night Witches” by the Germans:
About White Friday, when soldiers on multiple sides got buried in the worst avalanche in recorded history:
About the general shell-shock of soldiers in WWI:
About the world’s most successful sniper measured by confirmed kills, bonus points because no scope:
About the end of WWII:
Thanks. Very cool.
I’m not a big fan of metal, but Soldier of Heaven hooked me instantly. Great song.
AN excellent piece by Coffee and Covid today about the history of scientific concensus.
https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/no-consensus-friday-october-17-2025
John Snow is a bona-fide hero of science. (* Not the surly bastard prince from Game of Thrones.) Snow might be one of the most famous doctors in the great pantheon of famous historical epidemiologists. Epidemiologists often celebrate Snow as the crowning example of the triumph of scientific reasoning and “medical detective work.” But that is rank revisionism. Snow IS a hero, but he’s definitely not Science’s hero.
Science appropriated John Snow after he died penniless and forgotten, whitewashing their culpability. But Snow was never one of their own. He was opposed by Science at every step.
Nice. I’ve read about that amazing story before.
Right up there with Ancel Keys’ heart health hypothesis/statin racket and the mRNA transfection safe and effective campaign.
B has been unmasked! He’s a Hungarian named Matics Balázs.
Yes, I saw that a few weeks ago. He’s a very good writer.
An excellent video by Rick about AI
“We find the human abundance of this world to be 6.1±2 million” Reconstructing the biogeography of a hunter-gatherer planet using machine-learning Marcus J. Hamilton, Robert S. Walker, Briggs Buchanan, Damian E. Blasi, Claire L. Bowern
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.08.21.457222
It would be interesting to know the HG population for the existing degraded environment of planet Earth with the limited mammal population and vastly degraded genetics of the remaining mammal, fish and bird populations..
In any such studies or research the overall degradation of vastly reduced natural populations tends to ignore how genetic diversity has also been weakened by the huge die-off of their populations and hence how vulnerable to diseases the smaller gene pools have become.
The only mammals that I can think of that would still have great variation in the gene pools are rats, mice, rabbits, cats and foxes which have likely grown in population numbers and spread with humans across the world. Any others??
The carrying capacity at that point may be zero…
Salmon here are almost all from hatcheries and have limited genetic diversity. A few years ago I was taken fishing on the west coast of Vancouver Island by expert family fishermen and I observed every fish we caught was identical in size and look. When I was a kid there was huge variation in the salmon we caught.
Racoons seem to thrive here with humans. I’d have to be pretty hungry to eat one.
not that bad everywhere. I am going moose hunting next week and I did catch a marlin this summer.
“The hypothetical hunter-gatherer planet Earth we reconstruct here would have an abundance of 6.1±2 million people ” Reconstructing the biogeography of a hunter-gatherer planet using machine-learning
Marcus J. Hamilton, Robert S. Walker, Briggs Buchanan, Damian E. Blasi, Claire L. Bowern
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.08.21.457222
Interesting, thanks.
A 6 million upper limit will impose severe limits on technology and complexity.
For comparison, 6 million is roughly the population of Denmark, Paraguay, Singapore, the Republic of the Congo, or Toronto (Metro Area).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities#Metropolitan_area
We have overshot carrying capacity by 3 orders of magnitude. Wow.
A collapse aware Public health professor is John Ioannidis (Standford). He is exremly sceptical about modern medical science and covid managment. He has written an article on collapse. Wont help but interesting writing “is society caught up in a Death Spiral? Modeling societal demise and its reversal Schippers MC, Ioannidis JPA, Luijks MWJ. Is society caught up in a Death Spiral? Modeling societal demise and its reversal. Front Sociol. 2024 Mar 12;9:1194597. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2024.1194597. PMID: 38533441; PMCID: PMC10964949.
A vicious cycle of self-reinforcing dysfunctional behavior, characterized by continuous flawed decision making, myopic single-minded focus on one (set of) solution(s), resource loss, denial, distrust, micromanagement, dogmatic thinking and learned helplessness.
“A Death Spiral is characterized by: (1) initial denial of the problem; (2) continuously and repeated flawed decision-making, often trying to fix the problem with the same ineffective solution over and over again; (3) increasing secrecy and denial, blame and scorn, avoidance and turf-protection, passivity and helplessness; (4) worsening of the situation, and a continuous (series of) crises following, further triggering a “survival mode” and tunnel vision, and (5) the felt or observed inability to escape or snap out of the ineffective cycle of decision-making. Other characteristics that emerge when the Death Spiral becomes apparent are: (1) a negative and distrustful atmosphere; (2) micromanagement: individuals, management or government trying to increase the number of (strict) rules and a focus on the adherence to those rules at the expense of effective problem-solving; and (3) censorship of opinions and knowledge outside the official narrative. These elements may be present to variable degrees concurrently and may reinforce each other. As the downward cycle continues, and resources loss escalates, the desperation principle may set in: a defensive mode in which people or groups aggressively and often irrationally try to hold on to the little resources that are left (Hobfoll et al., 2018), instead of thinking on how to snap out of the situation altogether.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38533441/
Really great find.
Prior research has shown that extreme inequalities lead to dysfunctional societies, both in the animal kingdom as well as in human societies (Grusky and Ku, 2008). In the animal kingdom it has been shown to lead to “behavioral sink” or extreme dysfunctional behavior (Anderson and Bushman, 2002). In the Universe 25 behavioral experiment, mice lived in perfect conditions with enough living space, food and water, but when their numbers grew, inequalities rose and the behavior of all mice became dysfunctional and led to the extinction of the colony, long before the maximum number of mice was reached (Calhoun, 1973; Adams and Ramsden, 2011).
I liked this from Art Berman
Process metaphysics eliminates the need for that fix. There are no fundamental parts from which wholes emerge—only flows of interaction nested within larger flows. What we once called emergent properties are simply patterns of temporary stability, like eddies in a stream or Jupiter’s red spot, sustained by the dynamics around them. The world is process through and through. Emergence was an artifact of reductionist thinking, made obsolete once we see that living systems never arose from dead matter because the flow was never dead to begin with.
Forcing novelty onto this system through rapid renewable expansion risks destabilizing both civilization and its supporting environment. The energy transition isn’t just naïve—it’s potentially destructive. We can’t treat Earth like a race car that needs new parts; we must learn to move with the flow of living systems, not against them. Swimming upstream against nature’s current never ends well.
https://www.artberman.com/blog/a-bolt-from-the-blue/
Saludos
el mar
I don’t know, it feels like a forced argument to make a point about something he feels strongly about. You could say the same about dozens of things like microplastics, CO2 concentration, pharmaceuticals, sugar, mono-crops, deforestation, etc. etc.
“After a few centuries, they began erecting stone statues on platforms, like the ones their Polynesian forebears had carved. With passing years, the statues and platforms became larger and larger, and the statues began sporting ten-ton red crowns–probably in an escalating spiral of one-upmanship, as rival clans tried to surpass each other with shows of wealth and power. (In the same way, successive Egyptian pharaohs built ever-larger pyramids. Today Hollywood movie moguls near my home in Los Angeles are displaying their wealth and power by building ever more ostentatious mansions.
No matter how exotic those lost civilizations seem, their framers were humans like us. Who is to say we won’t succumb to the same fate? Perhaps someday New York’s skyscrapers will stand derelict and overgrown with vegetation, like the temples at Angkor Wat and Tikal.”
-Easter’s End
by Jared Diamond
Frost began a few nights ago. We harvested the remaining 650 lbs of potatoes today.
The US supreme court is about to eviscerate what remains of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd67q9vq967o
Now’s the time to BUY the Magnificent 7 (or 8?)! AI will replace all those drone workers. FOMO, not me. What could go wrong, the FED will protect us?
Leverage in the stock market has been spiking since April. In September, margin debt – the amount investors borrowed from their brokers – spiked by another 6.3%, or by $67 billion, from August to a record $1.13 trillion.
. . .The additional leverage – borrowed money flowing into the stock market – creates buying pressure and drives stock higher. Leverage is the great accelerator on the way up, but it’s also the great accelerator on the way down. Multi-month surges in margin debt, jumping from new high to new high, indicate excessive speculation and risk-taking and have invariably led to sharp selloffs
Sell everything, buy AI stocks.
https://wolfstreet.com/2025/10/15/stock-market-leverage-blows-out/
AJ
Forget about Ukraine. It’s a proxy of the US and does what it’s told to do.
One nuke superpower (US) is attacking targets inside another nuke superpower (Russia).
This has not caused Russia to bend and Russia is still winning.
US is now planning to use more powerful weapons to attack inside Russia. These weapons can be configured as nukes and there is no good way to know they’re not carrying nukes.
The “diplomacy” is childish.
This would have been unthinkable when I was younger. Our leaders then knew better.
NATO on the border is an existential threat for Russia.
US plus all of NATO losing to Russia is an embarrassment too great to bare.
How can this end well?
I can understand why countries like Poland and the Baltic States would want to join NATO. If you were in their position, would you trust Russia?
I’d like Canada to have nukes pointing at Washington DC but it doesn’t matter what I want, the US would never permit it because they would view that as an existential threat to their security.
Just as Russia views Ukraine joining NATO. I think Russia is ok with Poland and the Baltic states in NATO.
In reality I would think that Poland and the Baltics would have more to fear from Europe (Germans or French). The USSR only “controlled” each after WW2. Russia is not the USSR. In addition the French and Germans have overrun Poland and the Baltics at least twice (Napolean and Hitler). I would trust Russia not to invade if I were either of them.
But I’m sure Russia would prefer friendly governments just like the U.S. wants compliant governments in Canada and Mexico (and Cuba, Central America, South America, the WORLD)?
AJ
But for the people living in those countries, the soviet occupation is within living memory, while only people in their late 80s or older personally remember the German invasion, and anyone who remembered the French invasion is long dead.
Slow couple of days here. What, nobody has anything to say all of sudden?
LOL, trust me, I get it. What’s the point?
Lately I feel exactly like that brilliant eleven-word essay that Megacancer posted a while back: It’s not worth the effort in the Theatre of the Absurd.
Well brace yourselves because I woke up to some great breaking news today. Our energy problems are over. (h/t Sam Mitchell). Here’s a couple highlights:
It’s a members only article so just use the old trick. Paste the 1st link into the 2nd link where it says Enter Medium post link.
View at Medium.com
Breaking Medium paywall! – Freedium
Kilgore loves his napalm, but I love the smell of desperation in the morning.
Yes, I’m feeling uncomfortably numb these days.
I watched the napalm chestnut but will skip the wireless energy paper, just like I skip papers on horoscopes and homeopathy.
I feel like I have been waiting for the “other shoe to drop” on the whole collapse scenario forever, but now it seems to be coming fast (none of the 5, 10 or 20 years stuff).
It’s all been said and not much new to say except for the myriad of ways people deny.
AJ
Ditto on quantum whatever, unless Dr. Hossenfelder discusses it.
P.S. I made this observation before but in case you missed it I think it’s a brave and significant subtle message from Dr. Hossenfelder that she has worn the same purple top in almost every one of her hundreds of videos over that last 3 or 4 years.
That’s deep green.
If you’re depressed wondering how the covid criminals got away with killing 20+ million people, go back down the Building 7 rabbit hole and the probable involvement of… you guessed it, the Israelis.
It’ll make you feel better about covid, but worse overall.
Despite being a tiny grubby country with no resources, those genociding weasels are everywhere.
Did you notice that the Venezuelan leader-in-waiting for regime change, who just won the Nobel peace prize, said her first priority will be to move the Venezuelan embassy to Jerusalem?
Do you recall which country was the first to sign up for an aggressive country wide test of mRNA transfections? You guessed it, Israel.
You can’t make this shit up.
To add some evidence, Here is the deepdive to put the legs under your thesis: https://www.unz.com/nfinkelstein/to-live-or-to-perish/
Says Finkelstein, b 1951, primary fields of research are the politics of the Holocaust and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Finkelstein was born in New York City to Jewish Holocaust-survivor parents. (Wiki):
From the above link,
“It’s a wretched irony that, after the ‘67 war, American Jews rallied behind Israel as they proved their manhood and mettle and vindicated their honor by vicariously beating up on mostly defenseless Arabs.
Like other countries, Israel could have abolished, preserved and overcome its original sin. But after ’67, Israel got carried away, it got intoxicated by power. It’s now a lunatic place.
The ‘67 war set in train a sequence of developments that turned it into a very ugly place. Yes, it can lay claim to an impressive high-tech sector, but that’s about it.
Remember, the Israelis don’t just hate Arabs. They’re in an eternal war with all the goyim. All the goyim wanted the Jews dead. Just read Daniel Goldhagen if you have any doubts. The Americans are goyim. They refused entry to Jews fleeing the Holocaust; they didn’t bomb the railway tracks to Auschwitz; they, too, wanted all the Jews dead. Now they’re butting into our war, dispatching a spy ship into our waters, trying to restrain us in our moment of glory. Fuck the Americans! Fuck the goyim! Long live the Jews!”
And over here at https://www.unz.com/article/the-public-execution-of-charlie-kirk/.
I recently discovered this european site, publishing in english and german; Swiss Policy Research (SPR), founded in 2016, “is an independent, nonpartisan and nonprofit research group investigating geopolitical propaganda. SPR is composed of independent academics and receives no external funding other than reader donations. Our analyses have been published by numerous independent media outlets and have been translated into more than two dozen languages.“
Israel/Palestine Conflict
Ukraine War
Simulated Terrorism
Coronavirus Pandemic
Media and Propaganda
Geopolitics and War
Additional Articles
Documentaries
Medical Topics
Criticism of SPR
Reader Feedback
What Readers Say About SPR (2024)
Damn!! Ian, you’re a conspiracy machine. LOL
I don’t know what’s real or not, but you just provided me with lots of entertainment. Thanks.
Have read a few articles so far and I end up clicking on other links within the article which opens up even more crazy doors… it’s like a gigantic, tangled web of never-ending rabbit holes.😊
I mostly stay away from this shit nowadays. “The Peak of Insanity” is a good enough explanation for me… but I have to admit, it’s fun to explore some of this stuff.
I put that list up cuz you were crying the blues about slow news days!! It’s not my assembly tho, that list is from http://www.swpr.org, an anonymous collection of researchers, academics etc who want to expose the spin in the news.
I really like their media navigator chart on one page; 2×2 lib vs conserv and establishment bias close vs distant. 72 news outlets, here’s the list
Direct links to media outlets
But if you want a site that does the work for you, http://www.ground.news, they call themselves a a platform that makes it easy to compare news sources, read between the lines of media bias and break free from algorithms.
Nice, you’ve got some comedy chops. That 1st line had me cracking up.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168192323000151
This study might be of interest, it talks of simultaneous breadbasket failure due to climate change. This may be the most important impact from climate change on the stability of global civilization.
At first glance it appears a strange coincidence that the two most important factors affecting agriculture yields, climate and diesel fuel/nitrogen fertilizer, will fail at about the same time, and yet they are actually caused by the same thing: digging up a finite resource and burning most of it.
I think I have posted this before, but here it is again.
Click to access Bendell_BeyondFedUp.pdf
Here is a TL;DR from the paper itself.
Our analysis shows that remaining reserves will soon become severely constrained which is in agreement with the International Energy Agency (IEA), as reported in Reuters:
https://www.wildpeaches.xyz/blog/2025-10-03-energy-review-2025
Saludos
el mar
You probably seen this article: Our hunter-gatherer future
Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization – ScienceDirect
B today on coal.
Thanks to MORT we’re pretending that a depletion driven decline is a proactive choice.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-mythical-return-to-coal
Jack Alpert has updated the only (possibly feasible) plan in existence for retaining some of the best accomplishments of the human species.
I did not notice any significant changes from the previous version. Still no discussion of the technical feasibility of engineering a 100% safe and effective contagious sterility virus.
Rob, I always come to the conclusion that we can’t retain any of modernity with a vastly reduced population, especially with depleted resources. once collapse sets in, that’s it for modernity within a decade or so at best for most ‘modern’ conveniences.
The 50M that Jack alludes to just couldn’t sustain any modernity at all. There is simply not enough population for all the factories that make machines to make the consumer machines, nor enough for all the manufacture of all the recycling equipment, smelters, refiners etc. What we have now is spread around the world to make everything happen, with the Journey of Your Junk video being a perfect example of the sheer complexity of every aspect of modernity.
Reality 101 is clear that we are heading straight for collapse as no-one is seriously trying to avoid the coming collapse. I’m talking about a scale that matters, not the odd plans of individuals here and there.
We have to live and survive in the existing system, pay our taxes and rents, plus pay for food, clothing and shelter in every modern country. There is no choice to opt out of the system at all, it’s compulsory. This means that when we go over the Seneca cliff we do it as a whole society.
I think the movie “Threads” the other day reminded me of what’s most likely to happen as we are going down rapidly. The authorities will confiscate anything we try to keep in prepping, from extra fuel, to crops, to our muscles if we can be of service to them, all without choice. there will certainly be someone of authority in your area, either the last police, army , army reserve, or just local thugs with guns, all totally unprepared for what’s coming, or worse already having their plans for taking over, prepared..
Civilization is in a predicament, end of story; and whether it’s Jack’s plan or Simon Michaux’s self sufficient isolated community plan with modernity, they can’t and wont work, because to implement them beforehand means being outside of the current system and the existing system just wont let you do it in isolation to the rest of us.
The sheer complexity of modernity is precisely why Biosphere 1 and 2 didn’t work, there is always some part of our complex system that is forgotten about and will bring the experiment undone..
If I recall you’ve put a lot of effort into trying to be prepared. Are you selling it all so you’re in the same boat as you neighbors?
I’m not. There’ll be a lot of juicer targets than me for the local war lords to pick clean first.
My feelings exactly.
I’m always thinking about the Spring . . . T.S. Elliot “April is the cruelest month”. Spring, just when you’ve made it through Winter and you’re planting new crops is when you are closest to starvation as your food preps are running out because you’ve helped everyone around you.
I always am thinking about prepping and how woefully unprepared I am against all contingencies (enough food, water, heat, guns, skills, etc.). And ultimately it’s all I can do, but at the same time is probably useless.
AJ
Now that’s what I like to hear. Good comment.
And nice to see you’ve still got Threads on the brain. Me too. I’ll be thinking about that movie for a while.
Hideaway, I fear you are right.
TRUMP TAKES (TMOB)
White House: Trump gets COVID shot in preparation for upcoming travel
“President Donald Trump has received updated flu and COVID-19 booster shots in preparation for upcoming travel, the president’s physician announced Oct. 10.
Sean P. Barbabella, a U.S. Navy captain, shared the information in a letter submitted Friday to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
“President Donald J. Trump successfully completed a scheduled follow-up evaluation today at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center,” Barbabella wrote, saying the visit was part of the president’s ongoing health maintenance plan and included “advanced imaging, lab testing and preventative assessments.”
Trump gets COVID shot, doctor says president is in ‘excellent’ health
Trump’s mental abilities have significantly declined.
Some analysts I trust are now saying in a serious non-political way that Trump is not ok.
I think Russia knows this and is treating him like you’d treat an elderly crazy uncle with lots of guns.
On Friday, Barbabella said that in addition to Trump’s flu and COVID booster shots, the president also received preventative health screenings, he said, adding that Trump “continues to demonstrate excellent overall health.”
Just another lying MD who will say whatever he is told to say. Too bad the Hippocratic Oath doesn’t require doctor to tell the truth – “excellent overall health” (except for advanced senility).
AJ
I read somewhere it’s probably because of the statin he’s on.
Mike Stasse found a very interesting video on the complexity of supply chains behind the products we buy.
“Those simple parts collectively traveled over 500,000 km”, for comparison the distance to the moon is 380,000 km. If the supply chain for a paper shredder is that complex, imagine what the supply chain for consumer electronics must be like.
This clip made me laugh.
This video is fall of lies from the dummies that think EVs will save the planet. Substantially better government than the last one
Yes, their criticisms are vacuous left/right nonsense with no awareness of overshoot forces. They did a couple good ones on bad covid policies a few years ago but that did not require any overshoot awareness.
Just thought about it a bit more- I am suspicious that Labour NZ has paid these influencers to create this piece of misinformation content
Jane Goodall was at least partially overshoot aware.
https://overpopulation-project.com/farewell-to-jane-goodall-population-activist/
Boy it’s busy this morning.
B at Moon over Alabama has an in depth analysis of Trump’s response to China’s placing export controls on stuff going to the U.S. (and to other countries):
China is well prepared for that move. Its GDP this year will be around 20 trillion. Its total exports per year to the U.S. are around $500 billion, a mere 2.5% of its GDP. China can do without those while the U.S. can not.
What Trump does not get yet is that the U.S. depends more on imports from China than China depends on exporting to the United States. But the markets do understand that. Trump’s move may well be the black swan event that will lead to their crash.
If Trump doesn’t chicken out of this fight the U.S. economy is doomed.
The whole analysis is well worth reading: https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/10/u-s-china-trade-war-reaches-new-level.html
Is this the Black Swan that sinks the west?
AJ
Great article. It’s a good candidate for the trigger.
The US does not understand the tat part of tit-for-tat.
Iran is another candidate collapse trigger due to tit-for-tat. The citizens of Iran have united and are pissed for good reasons. They may decide to do some serious damage to western energy supplies if attacked, and to hell with the consequences.
Is it really different this time?
I liked this article by Wolf Street on the AI stock market mania.
He ultimately answers the question by suggesting that like the dot-com bubble there was something left over after the collapse – the internet and by implication the something that is left over in this case will be AI.
My perspective is that LLM AI is garbage in/garbage out and this is the last desperate grasp of HYPE that doesn’t truly understand the energy constraints on AI being powered by energy that’s just not there, as energy growth is starting to decline.
https://wolfstreet.com/2025/10/10/is-it-really-different-this-time/
AJ
Friday night movie recommendation. Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006) – IMDb
And the soundtrack is awesome. This is the main song throughout the movie.
So many movies I have ignored because their title put me off. Thanks for the recommendations that cause me to take a second look.
Just saw it has the young guy from Almost Famous – a must watch because of him, he was so good in that movie – and this was a really sweet song and clip. Thanks 🙂
Chris – wondering if i can be in touch via email…? a few questions for you on this theme.
Ya, Almost Famous is excellent.
Rob, when you get a minute, can you send Renaee my email address. Thanks.
done
The AI Manhattan Project. Given that the AI Bubble is about to burst, AI companies are now looking for military applications of their product. Palantir is also complicit in the Gaza genocide.
I’m not sure but I think some sort of message is being sent here…
I saw somewhere that the committee is doing this to try and stay on Trump’s good side. He wanted this prize and they are afraid of tarriffs and crap from him . Machado (a Margeret Thacher wanabe) is the anti-Maduro opposition in Venezuela. She is all behind the idea of a Trump war to remove Maduro and that way the Nobel Committee can avoid Trump’s wrath. Kinda like Obama getting the Peace prize and then using drone’s to murder U.S. citizens overseas is peace.
AJ
Interesting. I misinterpreted the message. I assumed Machado was an ethical activist and they were bitch-slapping Trump.
No, the analysis was from B over at Moon of Alabama.
https://www.moonofalabama.org/
AJ
Wow. The integrity of another once trusted institution destroyed.
What’s left for us to trust?
Peer review? Nope. Journalism? Nope. Healthcare? Nope. Universities? Nope.
Absolutely nothing left for us to trust. Some exceptions like un-Denial and a few other blogs, but that’s about it.
IIRC, this presentation was the best I’ve ever seen at breaking down how the US meddles with foreign affairs.
https://un-denial.com/2025/07/12/by-hideaway-eroei/comment-page-5/#comment-113788
I’ve started reading this book by JMG Decline and Fall: The End of Empire and the Future of Democracy in 21st Century America (2014). It is a good history lesson of how the USA has been meddling for over a century. Still a very relevant book to read today
J. Doe here.
Things you can always trust:
1) Mathematics
2) Thermodynamics (no matter what, be assured, entropy solves everything eventually!)
3) If you can perceive your own thoughts, you exist (in some way, probably)
Things you should never trust:
1) Humans
2) Robots created by humans
3) Anything else that has a Varkiistic neuroanatomy (that may or may not include yourself depending on your genetic makeup)
Vaccines works but highteck vaccines is unsustainable it depends on massive supply chain. “Vaccines are another key element of modern health care. They release carbon emissions not only through their development and production, but also by their resource-intensive distribution, which involves a dedicated cold chain”
Do you make a distinction between conventional live attenuated vaccines and mRNA transfections, or do you believe they are equally safe and effective?
mRNA vaccines is not effectiv and will lose effectivnes. I cant see massive side effects.
This was a test.
I see lots of side effects in the data but acknowledging that a novel technology that was coerced into billions after insufficient and fraudulent testing is not effective as claimed is good enough to pass the exam.
Welcome.
https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/the-impossible-mathematics-of-vaccine
Saludos
el mar
Unbelievable. Canadian Prepper spent the last couple years teaching his audience how to pick land and bragging about the doomstead he’s building in Saskatchewan just announced oops, he made a mistake, and is thinking about moving to Montana so he can have guns, better land with above ground water, and more trees.
The Matrix is a good anology. You can go in and out of the matrix. As a child and teenager I knew this world would collapse. We had a farm and I knew humans would use the diesel until the end. “Programming” in university plugged me into the matrix. Good times when you deny the matrix. The latest unplugging was when I worked in DRC. Then you could se how dependent everything is on the system. The best parts of the work in was trauma surgery. It was a lot of palliative care with children. Whats the point in diagnosing diabetes if you have no electricity? (Insulin need cooling). The problem is that when collapse approaches subconsciousness can wake you up from the sleep.
I’m still pretty sure Musk is a closet Themist.
I just read the Themist piece you linked to, and the comments. I wonder if you ever had any follow up with Michael Dowd on those issues? Did you do one of his recorded chats by any chance? I thought Gail’s writing was brilliant, I did not go to the link, just the parts you highlighted. So she was on board with MORT, it sounds like it from those few paras?
When I first woke up to collapse, I intuitively GOT it, but then after spending time in the doomersphere, I was lead astray somewhat, by the plethora of reading and ideas, it complicated things in my mind that were not there from the start. In reading Gail’s summary, she just nails it so succinctly.
Elon Musk – yes a doomer in disguise maybe!
I had one conversation with Michael Dowd and it was not pleasant. He had a belief that humans have in the past and could again in the future live sustainably. I was pretty sure he was wrong but suggested in the spirit of seeking truth that we investigate if there was any evidence to support his claims. He was not interested and it got fairly heated.
A few days later Michael apologized but we never spoke again.
In that call I also spent some time trying to understand his objective without success. My hunch was and is that he was a strong Christian trying to start a new sect focused on sustainable living and worship of nature. He disliked MORT I think because it provides a genetic explanation for why only one species believes in the god it made up.
LOL, if you were introduced to overshoot by Dowd, then say no more. I’m in the same boat.
He was seduced by the noble savage myth. And that’s because his teachers were seduced too. You won’t ever hear me bash Dowd too hard. He gets a pass because of all the great content he provided on his youtube & soundcloud channels. Plus, I absolutely love the man. But his teachers, like EO Wilson, Edward Goldsmith, Daniel Quinn, etc… they don’t get a pass. Especially DQ. That fucking guy is responsible for bamboozling more people into the noble savage myth than anyone else in history. lol
Dowd could never break free from it. He was close. Look at this comment. Came about a month after his ridiculous claim that there have been tens of thousands of sustainable cultures (yet couldn’t name one). He apologizes to Rob & Gail and basically admits he’s wrong:
https://un-denial.com/2019/07/04/by-gail-zawacki-on-themism-and-seeking-scapegoats-for-reality/#comment-5507
You can clearly see the confusion and frustration for him regarding this topic, just in this thread alone. Unfortunately, he strayed back to the bullshit. And up until his death he was still sticking to his guns. Every Dowd fan out there has probably heard this bit a hundred times:
I have to admit. I still love that bit (even though it instantly triggers me now). It’s so goddamn devilishly seductive.😊
Which is why I thought it important to understand Dowd’s objective.
If he was trying to create a movement for positive change by breaking off a chunk of Christians into a new sect with him as the prophet then you’d need a positive message like the one he preached.
I imagine one of the tricky things about creating a new sect is that you can never admit that’s what you’re trying to do. Maybe not even admit it to yourself.
J. Doe here.
I have never ever heard of this Dowd fellow. It’s interesting to see all the different routes that lead people this place.
For me, collapse awareness started from the simple observation that humans seemed to believe that infinite growth can exist on a finite planet. The whole premise just seemed absurd to me from an early age, and I started to dig ever deeper into scientific literature, such as Limits to Growth, Ecological Footprint Analysis, Resource Surveys, Pollution and Ecosystem reports and all that.
What struck me the most was a simple mathematical realization, which I jokingly refer to as my Holy Trinity:
1) Global GDP (roughly a 100 Trillion USD per year, currently)
2) Global Human Population (rounded up to 10 billion, currently)
3) Global Ecological Footprint (rounded up to 2 planets, currently)
If you simply divide 1) by 2), you get the amount of GDP available per person per year on average, which is roughly 10 000 USD. Let that sink in for a moment. The global economy, if shared perfectly equally between everyone alive, spits out only 10 000 USD of goods and services per person in a year. In some places, that would barely cover basic needs.
But the real kicker is that to get this, you have to destroy the planet, as the eco-footprint associated with this economic activity is 2 planets. If you wanted everyone to live a 50 000 USD lifestyle, you would have to go up to 10 planets – assuming little technological improvements. But if you wanted to stabilize the earth system, you would have to cut things in half – which is a 5 000 USD lifestyle for everyone. Good luck convincing the masses to vote for you! ;D
Personally, I see this as yet another case in favour of MORT – these numbers aren’t exactly hidden. They’re annually published by well-known international bodies. But no one seems to apply the highly forbidden art of basic math to them. It’s hilarious.
What made me land on un-denial was me trying to find more sources on Dr. Garrett’s research regarding the Garrett Relation that ties accumulated global economic activity to global energy requirements; I wasn’t aware of the MORT papers until then, but it felt like finding that final puzzle piece.
But it seems I skipped pretty much all the doomosphere entirely on that way. xD
That’s a great way of simplifying and explaining the issue.
For me the most interesting issue is why can almost no one see it? Hence my interest in Dr. Varki’s MORT.
Dr. Tim Garrett is another great example of MORT in action. He developed an important theory that links the economy to CO2 emissions which tells climate scientists everything they need to know and yet they universally ignore him and deny his theory. Despite their PhD’s, most climate scientists are incapable of understanding what you just wrote.
I’ve written about Garrett many times:
https://un-denial.com/2015/05/06/by-tim-garrett-thermodynamics-of-the-economy-interviews-and-papers/
https://un-denial.com/2021/02/23/by-tim-garrett-jevons-paradox-why-increasing-energy-efficiency-will-accelerate-global-climate-change/
https://un-denial.com/2018/03/25/by-tim-garrett-linking-wealth-energy-demand-co2-and-climate-change/
https://un-denial.com/2016/02/23/tim-garrett-on-the-nature-of-growth-and-our-special-place/
https://un-denial.com/2018/09/05/by-tim-garrett-the-global-economy-heat-engines-and-economic-collapse/
https://un-denial.com/2018/03/27/by-richard-nolthenius-the-thermodynamics-of-civilization/
https://un-denial.com/2018/08/04/by-richard-nolthenius-will-the-end-of-growth-tame-climate-change/
That Holy Trinity is cool. Nice and simple. And ya, the whole thing is hilarious.
I’ve been living very frugal since I retired. Looks like I’m gonna be at $17,000 spent for the year, which puts me in the bottom 10% for White Empire (officially starts at $22K). Four earths required just to support a global white trash lifestyle of the poorest Empire Babies. LOL!!
If the cost of living stays this way, which it won’t, I might be able to make it to 2030. That’s safe in my eyes because one of two things will have already happened by then. USA getting its ass kicked by BRICS… or my desert Arizona data centers and semiconductor chip plants have sucked up all the water in the entire southwest by then.
Your journey kinda confirms something I’ve been thinking for a while; That the best route to true awareness (like understanding that Mainlander quote) is to bypass the doomasphere altogether and just dive headfirst into the pessimistic authors. Way too much denial oozing in the doomer crowd… which makes it likely you’ll be steered in wrong directions. If true awareness is what you’re after, you’ll be in much better hands with the pessimistic/nihilistic crowd.
And then introduce MORT theory to a well-read nihilist… well, that’s about the perfect recipe right there.
ps. This song feels right for the mood of this thread.
$17K is very good. Congratulations.
Thanks. But I made a huge calculation error. Forgot to include my two vacations and Mr Zeus’s vet bill. That brings me closer to $20k.
I want to get it down to 15k next year. Easiest way to make that happen is to cancel my auto insurance which will save me $1100. Considering my car is paid off and I drive less than 5 miles per week, I should’ve already done this. But driving around without insurance is risky business with all the pigs patrolling in my neighborhood. And of course the first day I’m driving without insurance I’ll end up causing a huge accident and be shit out of luck.😂
The price of beef here has doubled in 9 months since January.
Pot roast at rock-bottom Costco price, after $10 off sale, is $26/Kg !
Would you pull the scumbag Cypher move if it meant you could go back to being a happy, ignorant, clueless fucking moron? Some days I can honestly answer no, but most days… hell yes!!
So watch your back, Rob and Hideaway cuz I’d sell you guys out to Agent Smith in a NY minute. 😂😂
J. Doe here.
I wouldn’t pull the Cypher move. Probably because I’m pretty much a hermit, and don’t really want to be part of any society at all. I like being alone. xD
Also, the Matrix is pretty shit. It runs on Windows XP:
LOL, great skit!
The Oracle had the best line: “Well hello there. Hope you have cookies enabled.”
I’m not worried. Nobody wants what I have.
Dont worry, it’s just the audio😊. I watched the movie last night. It has a great scene where a creepy maniacal voice is reading this old poem. I had to rewind it twenty times because I was instantly obsessed. So hauntingly mesmerizing. My new collapse theme music. Turns out the recording is over 100 years old!
Per Wikipedia – “Boots” is a poem by English author and poet Rudyard Kipling published in 1903. It imagines the repetitive thoughts of a British Army infantryman marching in South Africa during the Second Boer War. It has been suggested for the first four words of each line to be read slowly, at a rate of two words per second, to match with the cadence, or rhythm of a foot soldier marching.
The 1915 spoken-word recording of the poem by American actor Taylor Holmes has been used for its psychological effect in U.S. military Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape schools.
This is the recording of it with no music or edits.
BOOTS by Rudyard Kipling (1915) read by Taylor Holmes (cleaned audio)
And someone made a cool trailer with it for a different movie.
“Boots” – All Quiet On The Western Front (Edit)
Once again I’m struggling to understand a poem.
Kipling’s central theme is “there’s no discharge in the war”.
I don’t get it. The whole point of a war is to discharge weapons into the enemy. Why march long distances if there’s no discharge?
I wish poets would just state clearly whatever they’re trying to say.
LOL. FFS, turn off that analytical full consciousness brain of yours and just sit back and enjoy my new collapse theme.
But be careful. After listening for 30 minutes straight, you start going insane. No wonder they use it for PSYOPs.😊
I replied before seeing your reply one minute earlier 😉 nailed it (not that hard!)
Nice! We had a woo-woo moment. We were both thinking of this at exactly the same time, but I beat you by a few seconds.😊
Thank you for explaining. I do not understand why writers who are unable to communicate a crisp idea are respected.
J. Doe here.
Ever tried German military songs about simple soldiers knowing they’re probably going to die horribly?
This one kicks arse, too:
And a final third:
I have to add this, too, in the spirit of collapse: this song is about the German chemist who invented both chemical warfare and industrial agriculture, which is probably the one scientific breakthrough responsible that truly kicked the fire monkeys into ultra-overdrive. He’s the guy who killed millions, saved billions, then wrecked everything entirely. Germans. They’re just a crazy bunch. xD
I highly recommend this book on the history of the Haber-Bosch process.
https://un-denial.com/2016/02/03/book-review-the-alchemy-of-air-by-thomas-hager/
https://un-denial.com/2016/01/29/we-owe-our-existence-to-haber-bosch/
LOL, there is so much I don’t know. Never even heard of this guy (even though I know about the Haber-Bosch process).
I’ve had Edward Bernays at the top of my list of people who created the most evil… but it sounds like Bernays can’t hold a candle to Fritz Haber.
Welcome to J. Doe’s Denial-Free Fact Drops:
“Fritz Haber, a German chemist, is a complex historical figure known for both his scientific achievements and controversial actions. Below is a list of the dark aspects associated with his life and work, based on historical accounts:
Moral Ambiguity and Legacy: Haber’s legacy is deeply polarizing. While the Haber-Bosch process revolutionized agriculture, feeding billions, his role in chemical warfare overshadows this achievement for many. His willingness to prioritize nationalistic goals over ethical considerations remains a subject of criticism.
Development of Chemical Weapons: Haber is most infamous for his role in developing and promoting the use of chemical weapons, particularly chlorine gas, during World War I. As a key figure in Germany’s chemical warfare program, he oversaw the first large-scale use of chlorine gas at the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, which caused thousands of deaths and horrific injuries. His work earned him the nickname “father of chemical warfare.”
Moral Responsibility for Warfare Atrocities: Haber’s enthusiasm for chemical weapons extended beyond scientific development. He actively advocated for their use and personally supervised their deployment on the battlefield. Many historians argue he showed little remorse for the suffering caused, viewing it as a necessary part of modern warfare.
Personal Justification of Chemical Warfare: Haber reportedly justified chemical weapons as a more “humane” form of warfare, arguing they could end conflicts quickly. This stance was widely criticized, as chemical weapons caused prolonged agony and environmental damage, contradicting his claims.
Alienation from the Scientific Community: His work on chemical weapons led to significant backlash from the international scientific community. Despite winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for the Haber-Bosch process (which synthesizes ammonia for fertilizers), many scientists boycotted the award ceremony due to his role in chemical warfare.
Impact on Family: Haber’s dedication to chemical warfare had tragic personal consequences. His first wife, Clara Immerwahr, a talented chemist and the first woman to earn a PhD at the University of Breslau, strongly opposed his work on chemical weapons. Their conflicting views strained their marriage, and in 1915, shortly after the first use of chlorine gas, Clara died by suicide, reportedly using Haber’s military pistol. While the exact reasons are debated, many historians link her death to her horror at his actions.
Association with Zyklon B: Haber’s research indirectly contributed to the development of Zyklon B, a cyanide-based pesticide later used by Nazi Germany in the Holocaust. While Haber did not develop Zyklon B himself, his work on chemical agents at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute laid groundwork for its creation. Tragically, Haber was Jewish, and many of his relatives were later killed using Zyklon B in concentration camps.
Exile and Persecution: Despite his contributions to Germany, Haber faced antisemitism as a Jewish scientist. In 1933, with the rise of the Nazi regime, he was forced to resign from his position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and flee Germany. This exile was a bitter irony, given his intense patriotism and contributions to German industry and warfare.”
In addition to all that, ammonia made by the Haber-Bosch process is a key feedstock for making nitric acid and ammonium nitrate, which are direct precursors for many explosives like TNT, nitroglycerin, and ammonium nitrate explosives.
Haber–Bosch made large-scale production of explosives possible which escalated the lethality of war starting with WWI.
I think it’s irony, that there are weapons discharged but no escape, no relief, paired with the relentlessness of boots boots – maybe?
Review here of this movie – 7 stars 😉 https://movie-reviews.com.au/28yearslater I watched the original but wont be watching this one!
Last night we took a break form northern exposure to watch new doco on YT called BirthGap about – wait for it, the danger of dwindling population around the world. Recommended by doomer friend in Tassie, really interesting and had old clips of Erlich at the start. Will continue watching tonight.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/10/06/the-trump-peace-plan-is-itself-a-war-crime/
The Trump ‘Peace Plan’ is Itself a War Crime
We don’t need an EMP or diesel shortages to take out the grid. Just insufficient replacement of rotting wood utility poles.
If you watch this interesting discussion you’ll be the 4th viewer.
You would literally never see something this bad in New Zealand. Though we did have a massive electricity pylon fall over when the maintenance guys removed too many bolts
https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/350364177/how-transpower-pylon-fell-over-causing-mass-power-outage-northland
Plus how do you not get serious fines under H&S legislation for this in the USA
Sorry one more thought, how does this look more like India than New Zealand? That is wild to me that the USA looks so backwards
The first time you install a power pole it increases productivity, which creates growth, which enables self-extinguishing credit to pay for the power pole.
Later when the power pole rots and must be replaced, no new growth is created, which makes it much harder to fund the maintenance.
This in part explains the difference between China’s shiny new, and US’s creaking old, infrastructure.
A couple nuggets from Panopticon’s latest economic news roundup.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/rising-tungsten-prices-worsen-oil-drillers-inflation-worries-2025-10-08/
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/OPEC-Nears-Its-Limit-Leaving-Prices-One-Crisis-Away-from-a-Spike.html
Mike Stasse found a video on complexity that Hideaway might enjoy.
Must watch I’d say.
Quite a remarkable monologue. Her understanding of forces conspiring to collapse complexity is deep and wide, and yet, and yet, and yet, she seems to be blind to energy/materials depletion and overshoot.
Without depletion and overshoot we face political problems that can be fixed with a vote.
With depletion and overshoot there is no fix. So we again see MORT in action.
Canterel predicts some sort of breakdown could occur in as little as 4-8 weeks, with US regime collapse in 6-16 weeks.
Hmmm… I’ve got rice for 5 years. Should I buy more? We don’t grow it in Canada and it keeps better than potatoes.
I watched it too. Like you allude to, she thinks the wrong people are in power and maybe with the right ones what would happen? It would be interesting to see Hideaway’s take on her ideas.
5 years of rice, you are an optomist about your chances of survival. I’m a pessimist about my own.
AJ
I watch the video, the first couple of minutes a few times, where she generally gets all the macro/research stuff correct. For instance there are papers like the following …..
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-57007-1
The authors are pupils of P. Turchin..
“While both types of phase transitions have been extensively studied in the context of many physical10 and other complex systems11,12, the microscopic mechanism of these transitions and, in particular, the mechanism origin of the abrupt transition has not yet been fully understood. Here, we demonstrate that a possible origin of abrupt transitions is due to an additional long-range interaction, and the mechanism is long-term microscopic changes.“
Yes there are processes in the background that are basically white anting all types of systems. However many in the field of ‘complexity science’ get lost in details of the one or 2 things they might be studying, where the real reason behind it all is energy, or lack thereof, in immediately cheaply useable form.
Her later stuff on the US collapsing because of a cascade of events etc, which included food shortages in there, along with a glut of soy because China is buying elsewhere, didn’t quite gel for me.
People tend to make the mistake that complex systems are resilient, which they are, but not for the reasons often given. They are resilient because there are so many useless processes using up energy and materials within the system (that some call waste), which allows a complex system to enact changes within, becoming more highly complex, without too much disruption, however new ‘waste’ happens as in Jevon’s paradox, which increases overall use of energy and materials.
However as systems become more complex and ‘waste’ is deliberately eliminated, in the process of becoming more efficient, they also become more fragile, as there is less of a cushion from all the ‘waste’ no longer happening.
Remember Turchin and most pupils of his are all about inequality being the cause/reason being the failure within complex human civilizations and tend to overlook EROEI and falling material grades as causes of the inequality.
Our civilization has been undergoing the effects of ‘white anting’ since the early ’70s for energy and around the year 2000 for materials. We were overcoming the loss of exponential growth in energy availability with massive efficiency gains in the following decades. The simply seen example of this is mining dump trucks that went from 30+ tonnes in the early 1960’s to 300-400+ tonne monsters by the early 2000’s. Now we are only getting slight gains of efficiency in mining as we used all the easy to access gains (law of diminishing returns), and since around then it has taken more energy to gain a tonne of copper, because the grades/depths/ore hardness index/rock crush size/waste ratio/ etc improvements can’t keep up with declining grades and the other problems.
I suspect these are exactly the ‘microscopic mechanisms’ not known about in the paper linked above. Realistically though, the ore grade does not matter if you have unlimited really cheap/free energy, which doesn’t exist in the real world, though we mostly still think it does if talking to an economist…
Assuming no wars, no financial disaster, no pandemic, no sudden fall in population etc, all seemingly highly unlikely, we will run into a point where total energy mined or produced, (by whatever method) cannot keep rising and starts to fall, the Earth is finite after all… Once total energy stays flat for a period of time, all the white anting of not enough to keep everything going really takes off, let alone the period when mining/production of energy starts to fall, year after year.
So much of the white anting (OK I don’t like all the official language they use in physics to confuse people), is unseen and not knowable. For example what happens when the sales of roller skates, skate boards, go karts, outboard motors, motor bikes, cars, caravans, motor mowers, brush cutters, home handyman tools of drills, saws, angle grinders, etc, etc are no longer for sale as the market died due to economic difficulties with high oil, gas, coal and electricity prices rising, while wages stay stagnant or decline? All the businesses making all the bearings and other moulded parts cut back due to loss of sales, or go out of business altogether.
What happens if they also made parts for Caterpillar bulldozers, excavators and dump trucks?? It’s the minor changes in the background that accumulate to cause what seems sudden large changes, when Caterpillar can suddenly no longer supply the parts they always use to, and no-one could see the problem develop in the background as energy prices rose and consumer sales fell.
The hidden problems were always going to turn up with less energy, but we have lived in an era of more, more, more and mort, so can’t fathom the difference that ‘less’ will quickly make, when it quickly becomes impossible to mine the remaining oil, gas, coal, copper, iron, phosphate, nickel, tin, lead, lithium, sand, gravel etc..
Oops, not sure if I answered the query about the video, or just went off on a tangent…
I thoroughly enjoy reading your responses, here and in SEEDS, and reading this one made me think of what is currently happening to jaguar land rover.
They’ve suffered a ransomware attack, and now the jobs of 100s of thousands of people employed in supplying the company are at risk.
Not a direct analogy to what you’re saying, but very similar.
For all the non-aussies:
Good insight about resilience resulting from waste in the system, not the complexity.
I think about the leading tool store here with amazing prices and selection of products from China, but it has about 3 of each tool in stock and is topped up daily via trucks. It’s a complex system with little wasted inventory so is fragile.
Inequality is a favorite explanation of problems because it can be fixed with a vote, unlike falling EROEI which requires an acknowledgement of overshoot with no fix.
Another very good critique of AI.
Some nuggets I remember:
Most interesting was the observation that AIs make up about 20% of the “facts” they give you, presumably to tell you what they think you want to hear, but this corrupt 20% now becomes source material for another AI doing similar research which adds another 20% of fiction, and so on, resulting in a self-reinforcing meltdown of internet integrity.
So my job is business writing and planning. You would think AI would be amazing, but it is not. I haven’t been able to outsource anything to it yet. It is helpful for framing content, and re-drafting stuff that is almost there. But I’ve been quite disappointed in it to be honest. It can’t do anything strategic and it can’t synthesize ideas. It blatantly keeps forgetting rules you tell it and makes a lot of mistakes. So checking everything can take longer than just doing the task manually.
Also, I was trying to use AI to help me with researching my deep time essay, and it kept getting every single pre-history date wrong, sometimes very wrong. I ended up relying on Wikipedia for fact checking.
By the way, I’ve just got to the Cenozoic (after the comet that killed the dinosaurs), so still a lot to do 🙂
Preptip:
If you’re looking for a cheap spare phone I can vouch for the Samsung A16 because I have the almost identical A15.
The A16 price has bounced between CDN$260 and $240 all year but today dropped to an amazing $200, presumably because the A17 will soon be launched.
The A16 has an excellent display, battery, and duration of software updates, so-so but plenty good enough camera and performance, and has a microSD slot so you can add giant storage for your end-of-days movie collection.
I helped a friend buy two A16s today.
If you want a case to protect it I recommend Spigen which has a nice light and a nice heavy-duty option.
What size microSD card do you have and where did you get it. Big storage (1TB+) is expensive. Some cheapies on Aliexpress but have bad reviews due to actual storage nowhere near advertised.
I agree 1TB is still a little too expensive. I think the sweet spot today is 512GB and I have 1 in my phone plus (of course) 1 spare. CDN$50 is a fair price for 512GB and there are often excellent Black Friday sales.
512GB holds a LOT of movies, music and books, and I’m currently not pining for a 1 TB card.
I would not buy a memory card from AliExpress. I stay with good brands like SanDisk and buy from Amazon when they go on sale. In case you’re not aware of it, CamelCamelCamel is an excellent site that tracks prices of Amazon products and permits you to set alerts for desired prices so you don’t have to keep checking Amazon all the time.
Gail Tverberg with a good article that ends with god and hopium.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2025/10/06/what-has-gone-wrong-with-the-economy-can-it-be-fixed/
“Another possibility for hope comes through greater efficiency in using fossil fuels. History suggests that if we can figure out how to use fossil fuels more efficiently, the price of fossil fuels can rise higher. With a higher (inflation-adjusted) price, more oil and other fossil fuels can perhaps be extracted.
One thing that strikes me is the fact that economies are put together in an amazingly organized manner, with humans seeming to be put in charge of them. Everything I can see seems to suggest that there is a Higher Power, which some might call God, that is behind everything that happens. People talk about economies being self-organizing. However, in a way, it is as if a Higher Power is helping organize things for us. It appears to me that creation is an ongoing process, not something that stopped 13.8 billion years ago or 6,000 years ago.
Seeing how ecosystems heal themselves, and how humans have made it through many secular cycles so far, gives me hope for the future.”
Gail’s right. There are higher powers. They’re called Thermodynamics, Evolution, Maximum Power Principle, and Mind Over Reality Transition.
J. Doe here.
If I had to pick a single god to pray to, I would pray to Entropy! My inner nihilist just likes perfect silence, perfect cold and perfect darkness. Some would probably call it pure horror, but what would be more just than an absolutely equal distribution of matter and energy over space, so that no part of the universe has any more or any less stuff than every other part of it?
Thanks for the great glass half full perspective.
When the universe dies it will finally be neat and tidy.
I always felt that people have the glass half full/empty idea regarding pessimism and optimism wrong.
If you see the glass as half full then you are a pessimist as you focus is on the fact that the glass rather than being full is only half full, half gone already.
Whereas half empty focuses on the realisation that there is still half a glass to drink.
We have always been lead astray.
LOL. That’s not how my brain works. If I decided that the correct number of canned whatever is 72, and it gets down to 68, I get panicky.
J. Doe here.
I say everyone got it wrong.
The glass is always 100% full (assuming we are on planet earth’s surface, and a few more assumptions that are too many to list here), as any liquid drained from the glass will be instantly replaced by an equivalent amount of air.
Of course, this doesn’t hold when we’re in zero gravity, but when we’re in zero gravity, well, then whatever liquid is in your glass probably isn’t going to stay in there, anyway.
On top of that, due to the conservation of mass, the liquid missing from the glass isn’t gone, it’s just somewhere else, possibly undergoing chemical reactions. But no worries, those atoms won’t be gone for a very, very long time! ;D
You forgot one: quantum speed.
Has always been helping? Or only recently?
‘Always’ can’t work. The amount of destruction involved to get “advanced”… well, there just can’t be any higher purpose organizers trying to do this.
But at least ‘recently’ makes some sense. I can picture Higher Power checking in to see hunter/gatherer times 50k year ago:
“Remember that pale blue dot in the Milky Way where the blob cracked fire a while back? Well, it just recently cracked full consciousness. It’s already in runaway train mode.
Ok, time to intervene and start organizing things.
1st step: let’s part the clouds and give the blob some long-term climate stability.
2nd step: sit back and enjoy a quick, insanity filled, self-induced extinction.”
J. Doe here.
What I find hilarious is that humans never make up purely malevolent gods. It’s why I like HP Lovecraft’s works so much. Gods are real, but they all either don’t give a flying fuck about humans or just consider them a source of food or twisted entertainment. You get that higher power, but it only created everything just so it could watch it all burn.
Pretty much like Satan in this Children’s Movie (I am not making that up):
J Doe again.
Addendum: There is of course also the possibility that the higher power is addicted to certain adult themes and only created everything to satisfy associated urges, but then got over its addiction and then decided it’s no longer necessary to keep said creation around!
Excellent well documented history of how journalism transitioned from a profession with integrity to being corrupt shills for pharma and the government.
Journalism played a big role in the unnecessary covid related deaths of 20+ million people. I say unnecessary because even if you believe mRNA transfections had more benefits than harms, which the evidence clearly shows is not true, every single death resulted one way or another from bioweapons gain of function research initiated in the US and then off-shored to China when it became illegal to continue the research in the US.
Journalists are silent on this and dozens of other examples of covid incompetence and malfeasance.
No one has been held to account and lots of people made lots of money which means it will happen again.
Most citizens don’t care because the teevee tells them nothing bad happened. My closest friends and family still believe this BS.
https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/vaccine-amnesia-how-the-media-used
Many historic examples of good journalism follow.
Very good so far. I’m only halfway through.
Yes, but way more fascinating to me is that great minds like Bill Rees and Dave Pollard still believe this BS.
Sadly, and Dr. Ajit Varki. 🙁
I always forget that Varki is one of them also. LOL, so bizarre.
And honest question. If I was a pro vaxxer and obediently did whatever they told me regarding the vax and boosters from day one of covid…. how many jabs would I be up to now? 10, 20, 30? C’mon, surely it can’t be that much, right?
chatGPT says if you have normal health in the US you would have received 6 shots to date, and if immunocompromised about 9 shots, including 2 this year.
My understanding is that mRNA transfections damage the immune system which means everyone should have got 9 shots to date.
Great business model.
Given all the negative side effects of science and technology, it seems people are desperate for something purely good and noble to hang on to, and vaccines are often chosen as a favorite example.
Sewers would be a better choice but they lack cachet.
I vote for sewers too! I just finished reading “Black Autumn” (the first book in the series – with no intention of reading the others.) and the one take away I got was that in Collapse people will not have municipal water and will drink from any old stream. Where does any old stream come from? Probably from some old sewer drain upstream (for sure in most of the U.S.).
I get my water from a pipe the goes into a spring about 50 feet (there is no one up the mountain above me). I had the water tested when I first hooked the water to my house and it came back with choliform bacteria (from deer and other wild animals). I set up a system of filters and UV sterilization that uses almost no electricity. It will probably be the last thing I disconnect from the solar array. By that time, if I’m still alive, most of the problem will be gone.
AJ
Preptip:
My water supply from the city depends on electric pumps to get over a hill between me and the reservoir. I installed a pitcher pump on an old well on my property and I have an identical pitcher pump in storage for parts if anything breaks. Also have a Berkey style water filter and a few portable hiking water filters in storage, plus a supply of powdered bleach.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-end-of-degrowth
B argues that the West has been undergoing involuntary “degrowth” for the past half century.
I am not sure I would use the term “degrowth” to describe what has been happening. The difference between between degrowth and economic collapse is like the difference between controlled fasting and uncontrolled starvation.