Rob here: It’s a challenge to summarize in a few words Hideaway’s Complexity Accelerated Collapse of a Thermodynamically Unsustainable System (CACTUS) theory, but here’s my latest attempt:
- modernity depends on many non-renewable resources
- new resources must continuously be extracted from the earth’s crust to replace those burned or lost to decay, and because 100% recycling is not economical nor technically feasible for most resources
- reserve quality declines as non-renewable resources are extracted because they are finite, and because we consume the best first
- therefore, the energy, materials, and technology complexity used for resource extraction must increase to compensate for falling reserve quality to maintain a given extraction rate
- increasing civilization scale accelerates the development of higher extraction technology complexity
- increasing civilization scale increases the efficiency of resource use
- increasing civilization scale requires growth in non-renewable resource extraction
- therefore, increasing civilization scale BOTH enables and requires non-renewable resource flows to increase
- therefore, many complex interdependent self-reinforcing positive feedback loops collaborate to grow civilization quickly
- eventually, a physics limit is reached that prevents one or more non-renewable resource flows from increasing, which triggers a cascade of interdependent self-reinforcing negative feedback loops to collapse civilization’s scale and complexity
- therefore, modernity will be a short-lived rapidly growing and rapidly collapsing phenomenon anywhere that it emerges in the universe
- we have hit several limits to resource extraction growth and increasingly violent world affairs reflect stresses in a system preparing to collapse
- therefore, we are privileged to be alive to witness a rare peak of what is possible in the universe
Today’s essay by Hideaway takes a deep dive into points 5 & 6, the relationships between scale, efficiency, and complexity, and provides an explanation for point 11, why modernity is behaving like a supernova.
Enough fooling around with CACTUS limericks, let’s do some serious CACTUS math…
For me, coming across the scaling laws was like a bolt of lightening that connected everything about the complexity trap humanity has fallen into, and motivated me to research everything I could find about scaling laws and their relevance to all systems.
I knew that modern civilization couldn’t continue after fossil fuels because the EROEI of alternatives and nuclear was too low when taking the full wide boundary approach.
However, there was always the possibility of something new, or more improvements to existing technologies, that might allow modernity to continue, despite the fact that entropy and dissipation are real, and that lower ore grades require more energy to extract the same quantity of minerals and metals, and that we live on a finite planet.
Ingenuity, innovation, and agency are the reasons usually given for why limits don’t apply to for humans. I will show why the scaling laws override all claims that there are no limits.
The topic of how scaling laws will influence our future deserves a large book. This essay is as short as I could make it while still getting across important concepts.
I have used A.I. to help construct the tables and a few times used it to make some points concisely instead of me rambling on too long, so any change in writing style is where I’ve used A.I. to write the point concisely.
As you’re reading, if something is not making sense, wait for the “pivot”, because it didn’t make sense initially to me either.
I learnt a bit about biology scaling laws back in my Uni days many decades ago, however my more recent studies has been on how urban settlements also abide to scaling laws, with different rates than biology, and with some additional rules not seen in biology.
For mammals, as the size of the species increases, food intake also increases, but a doubling of size only leads to a 75% increase in food intake or metabolic rate. This is known as Kleiber’s law. The less specific observation that animals become more metabolically efficient as they grow in size is called the power law, hypometric scaling, or sub-linear scaling.
Plotting mammal species metabolic rate versus size on logarithmic scales results in a straight line with a slope less that 1.
The reason given for efficiency growing with size is usually the mathematical and geometric nature of the networks that distribute nutrients, and carry away waste and heat, as stated in the image above.
These networks are the circulatory system, the nervous system, the lymphatic system, the bone structure, sight and hearing connected to the nervous system, and others I may have missed.
In biology, the study of how the growth of structures and systems is influenced by size is known as allometry.
Of interest to me is that social insect colonies, like ants and bees, also demonstrate scaling laws similar to individual organisms, often also to the ¾ power, though not for everything.
Professor Geoffrey West, a physicist, has done a lot of research about how cities look and act like an organism, with economies of scale, and similar fractal internal networks. His research, and the research of his PhD students, determined that scaling laws for cities are slightly different than those in biology.
In human settlements characterized as ‘urban’ centres, a doubling in size results in an 85% increase in many aspects like road surface area, power line length, number of gas stations, etc., all the physical type attributes. Other aspects, like population density in megacities, scale at the 75% power law.
Interestingly though, we are not entirely as efficient as nature, that mostly scales at a 75% for a doubling in mass.
There are some aspects of cities that scale at greater than 100% for a doubling in size, the socioeconomic aspects, as Geoffrey West explains:
“The bigger the city is, the less infrastructure you need per capita. That law seems to be the same in all of the data we can get at. It is a really interesting relationship, and it’s very reminiscent of scaling laws in biology. However, when we looked at socioeconomic quantities—quantities that have no analogue in biology, like wages, patents produced, crime, number of police, etcetera—we found that unlike everything we’d seen in biology, cities scale in a super-linear fashion: The exponent was bigger than 1, about 1.15. That means that when you double the size of the city, you get more than double the amount of both good and bad socioeconomic quantities—patents, aids cases, wages, crime, and so on.”
More can be learned by reading Prof. West’s book “Scale”, or by watching one or two of his YouTube videos.
Two aspects of scaling are massively relevant to our existing civilization: the efficiency gains that resulted from growing towns and cities, around the world, compared if we had stayed a rurally based population, with the same population.
Take an example of a material, let’s call it “K”, it could be bitumen for roads, or wire in overhead transmissions, or bricks in shops or commercial premises, etc., any physical attribute that has scaled at around 85% for every doubling of population. A city that has grown over the last 100 plus years from 100,000 to a current 3.2M has had 5 doublings in population size, while “K” that originally had 85,000 tonnes used for infrastructure has grown to 1.842M tonnes of use with the same doublings of population. It’s still massive growth, but if the growth had matched population growth on a one for one basis, as in scaled at 1, it would have grown to 2.7M tonnes of use. Think of all the energy and materials saved by using only 1.8M tonnes of “K” instead of 2.7M tonnes for the same population if it had scaled a 1:1 instead of sub-linearly at 0.85:1.
While this sub-linear scaling for materials and energy use has been an advantage for efficiency in the cities, it almost always goes unnoticed in our modern world as there is still a vast increase in energy and material use, plus cities are huge vacuums of resources from their hinterlands and we tend to focus just on the increased use of both energy and materials, while not realising the efficiency gains in the background.
Where do all the efficiency gains come from, apart from the usual excuse of human ingenuity? In the case of scaling laws, it’s the other side of the coin. With human settlements we have super-linear scaling or hypermetric scaling (above 1 around 1.15) for just about every aspect of socio economic human interaction. Whether it’s ideas, innovation, patents, arts, wages, GDP, money, debt, research, R&D expenditure, telecommunication volume, social interactions, or even walking speed!!
However, we also get hyperlinear scaling of around the same 1.15 or 115% for every doubling of the population for crime rates, disease spread, police, traffic congestion, pollution, and waste.
Pivot 1!!
I want to stop here for a second, because the theory and research findings, suddenly didn’t make sense to me!!
How can urban areas/cities of which a huge proportion of humans now live in compared to prior historic times be more energy efficient at the rate of 85% for every doubling in their population, when overall energy use has grown by something like 30 times while the population has grown by 10-12 times, in other words a super-linear scaling of overall energy use?
I track this inconsistency back to the definition of urban areas/cities. What they are measuring has been the residential and old commercial part of cities or central local government areas, where all the people mostly live, not the entire metropolitan area including all the industrial areas and ports!!
The following map/diagram, is a heat map of a city in Northern Italy, Padua. It doesn’t matter which one, as it shows the entropy of a city, but also has where the old city centre is located compared to today’s energy use. Notice how number 6 is the old city centre, which has had the population double and double again over time, where the huge sublinear scaling of an 85% increase in energy use, infrastructure etc. has occurred for every doubling of human population, even though many of those people might work in the Industrial area number 1, that is excluded from the calculations of energy use for the ‘city’. The cities physical limits stay constant in all the research.
It doesn’t matter how the research is not that accurate for overall growth as portrayed by Prof West in so many videos. It is still accurate and important for the efficiency gains we’ve had for where people live and interact.
It also makes a lot of logical sense, as people living in high rise smaller apartments have obvious heating and cooling savings, material savings in construction, less street area per person etc., compared to those living in stand alone housing in rural areas. Plus less distance to the supermarket, or restaurant, or university, or office block, etc..
End pivot.
Back to scaling laws that definitely apply in nature such as in Kleiber’s Law described above. What if we took the entirety of human civilization as a whole, as no city in the modern world can build, exist or operate without inputs from across the world, whereas this might have been restricted to the local area 600 years ago, so we must accommodate for this massive change.
The character of cities has evolved from originally relying solely upon their hinterland thousands of years ago, to being totally dependent upon areas outside their hinterland today.
Using total human population doublings compared to energy and materials growth we get the following over the last few doublings.
The Long-Term Scaling of the “Bloom”
| Population Doubling | Approx. Dates | Total Energy Increase | Scaling Exponent |
| 500M – 1B | ~1500 – 1804 | ~1.3x to 1.5x | ~0.4 to 0.6 (Hypometric) |
| 1B – 2B | 1804 – 1927 | ~5x to 6x | ~2.3 to 2.6 (Extreme Hyper-linear) |
| 2B – 4B | 1927 – 1974 | ~4.7x | ~2.2 (Extreme Hyper-linear) |
| 4B – 8B | 1974 – 2022 | ~2.5x | ~1.3 (Hyper-linear) |
| Population Milestone | Approx. Year | Total Material Use (Gt/yr) | Global “Metabolism” per Person |
| 500 Million | ~1500 | ~1.0 Gt | ~2 tonnes |
| 1 Billion | ~1804 | ~2.5 Gt | ~2.5 tonnes |
| 2 Billion | ~1927 | ~7.0 Gt | ~3.5 tonnes |
| 4 Billion | ~1974 | ~30 Gt | ~7.5 tonnes |
| 8 Billion | ~2022 | ~100+ Gt | ~12.5 tonnes |
Notice how every aspect of energy and materials use is super linear scaled since the start of the fossil fuel era. If I was writing up chapters of a book, I’d break this down further for say a 15-20% increases in population and compared to above energy and materials use.
I’ve also been working on breaking it all up into other categories like net energy use, or total materials moved, that accounts for all the extra earth moving from mining 1% ore grades instead of 10% ore grades etc. None of them really change the big picture shown by just energy and materials above, except for the net energy where we are going backwards. By necessity though, net energy calculations are not possibly fully accurate, but the trend is what’s important…
Net Energy vs. Population Doublings (Estimates)
| Population Doubling | Total Energy (EJ) | Estimated EROI | Net Energy (Surplus) | Energy System Cost |
| 1B – 2B | 20 – 100 | 40 – 80 | ~5.1x Increase | ~2.5x Increase |
| 2B – 4B | 100 – 260 | 80 – 40 | ~2.6x Increase | ~5.2x Increase |
| 4B -8B | 260 – 600 | 40 – 15 | ~2.2x Increase | ~6.2x Increase |
Notice how net surplus energy after taking out estimated energy cost of energy is still super-linear in scaling. I therefore took it down to the increases in net energy for every 15% increase in population from more recently, from the end of exponential oil use growth.
Net Energy vs. 15% Population Growth (Post-1974)
Figures based on a weighted average global EROI that includes the shift from conventional oil (100:1) to unconventional (15:1) and renewables (<5:1 in full-system terms).
| Window | Pop. Growth | Net Energy Increase | Energy System “Tax” |
| 1974 – 1986 | +15.3% | ~24% | Baseline |
| 1986 – 1998 | +15.1% | ~19% | ~1.4x |
| 1998 – 2010 | +15.2% | ~12% | ~2.8x |
| 2010 – 2022 | +15.0% | ~4% | ~4.2x |
The energy tax is just the growing cost of gaining energy, but the obvious take from above is that since around 1998 while population has kept growing, net energy has not kept pace and the lag between them is growing. Meanwhile ore grades continue to decline and energy use to gain metals and minerals is accelerating. Calvo and Mudd 2016, have shown that a 30% increase in copper production came with a 46% increase in energy use for that production, which means falling ore grades, remoteness, deepness of mines, harder ore indexes have overcome any efficiency gains. This is another part of the story though, so I’ll leave it or this will be a book.
Pivot 2 !!
What about the super scaling aspects of human civilization, how do they fit into the big picture??
One aspect of super scaling of anything is that as you move forward in time at some point super-scaling has to reach infinity as it’s exponential growth.
Then there is the vast difference between the super-scaling that happened as populations doubled in urban areas and towns for all socioeconomic metrics, like innovation, GDP, patents, research, R&D expenditure, wages + salaries, wealth creation, higher degrees in specialities, information exchange, cultural output as in restaurants, theatres, creative venues, along with all the negatives of crime, police numbers, disease spread, waste, land rents and taxes, compared to physical super-linear scaling of materials and energy use. The former are all man made concepts, the latter have physical limits.
In the long term it’s impossible for these to reach infinity, so we know it simply cannot go on forever.
We also changed the scaling rules, instead of a town or city growing organically, we made the world pretty much as one, for a lot of our human interactions and storytelling.
We created the internet where communication is available instantly around the world. We have forums all over the place for sharing of all types of stories, YouTube videos for learning skills, or sharing new ideas on every possible range of topics. We have online journals in most specialist areas where a new article can be instantly shared around the world. All this accelerates the super-linear scaling of every socio economic metric.
The table below shows the rate of increase in our collective complexity, in other words the stories we tell ourselves.
Global Cumulative Growth per 15% Population Step (1970–2024)
| Population Milestone | Year (Approx.) | 15% Pop. Step | Global GDP (% Increase) | Scientific Papers (% Increase) | Administrative Loading (% Increase) |
| 3.7 Billion | 1970 | Base | Base | Base | Base |
| 4.25 Billion | 1978 | +15% | +44% | +40% | +35% |
| 4.9 Billion | 1986 | +15% | +31% | +43% | +28% |
| 5.6 Billion | 1994 | +15% | +28% | +50% | +32% |
| 6.5 Billion | 2005 | +16% | +46% | +100% | +55% |
| 7.5 Billion | 2017 | +15% | +40% | +100% | +62% |
| 8.0 Billion | 2024 | +7% | +18% | +70% | +40% |
I’ve included GDP as just a story we tell ourselves, just like every scientific paper (whether true or not!), plus every other nonphysical aspect of our modern world. We cannot live on these stories, we need food, shelter, clothing, etc., and we can earn money by telling these stories to each other and use money (another story humans tell each other!) to buy food, shelter and clothing.
However we don’t tell all these stories in a vacuum. Take the increased administration. This takes people, buildings, heating, air conditioning, paper, computers, etc. I can look at my local government in a rural area where over 40 years ago there was a shire secretary, a building inspector, a health inspector and a couple of administrative assistants. For pretty much the same population as back then, the administration has around 60 people, all using energy and physical resources.
End pivot…
Back to scaling laws in the natural world.
In the natural world, super-linear scaling is extremely rare, while sub-linear scaling occurs in many systems.
As noted early, nearly all life forms have a type of inherent sub-linear scaling and can exist for extremely long periods of time. The ecosystems the lifeforms collectively form also have this sub-linear scaling.
We also have sub-linear scaling in physical non-life systems, that are also extremely long lasting. For example a river length extends by around 0.6 for the increase in size of the river basin (Hack’s Law).
Then there is the surface volume law for planets and stars where the energy loss of a sphere is only 0.67 times the increase in volume (radius squared compared to radius cubed). This is why a large planet like Earth stays hot for billions of years, while a small satellite like our Moon cools down and “dies” quickly. The larger the mass, the more efficient the “insulation.” (more on stars later!!)
The dissipation of energy in large-scale fluids (like the wind or ocean currents) follows Kolmogorov scaling. The energy contained in small eddies scales sub-linearly relative to the energy in large-scale flows.
Also on the largest possible scale, the way matter is distributed in the universe follows sub-linear fractal patterns. The number of galaxies found within a sphere of radius scales with an exponent of roughly 2.0 (instead of 3.0). The universe isn’t a solid block of matter; it’s a web of filaments. This “under-filling” of space is sub-linear which allows gravity to balance the expansion of the universe without everything collapsing into a single point.
I could but won’t go on. Every one of the above sub-linear scaling laws in the natural world is a huge area of research by itself, with books and high-level research (stories by humans) about it all, if anyone is slightly interested.
Super-linear scaling is rare and only tends to last a short period of time.
In the natural world of life, super-linear scale events are things like cancer. A tumor’s metabolic demand and growth rate scale super-linearly relative to its mass. Because it scales faster than the host’s ability to provide energy (the sub-linear “pipes”), it eventually starves the host and itself. It is a “singularity” that ends in the death of the system.
Then there are outbreaks like a locust plague or an algal bloom. When a “pulse” of energy (like nitrogen/phosphorus runoff) hits water, the algae population scales super-linearly. They use the excess energy to replicate at a rate that ignores the usual “checks and balances.”
When environmental triggers (like sudden rain) occur, locusts undergo a “phase change” from solitary to gregarious. Their interaction density scales super-linearly, triggering a massive, coordinated population explosion.
Algal blooms grow so fast (super-linear demand) that they consume all the dissolved oxygen in the water (sub-linear supply). They literally suffocate the environment that supports them. A locust plague consumes every green thing in its path. It is a “vacuum” of energy that strips the landscape faster than the landscape can regenerate.
Because these processes are super-linear, they cannot reach a “steady state.” They always end in a Finite-Time Collapse:
The Algal Crash: Once the nutrients are gone or the oxygen is depleted, the algae die off en masse. This creates a “dead zone”—a state of high entropy and total system failure.
The Locust Die-off: Once the swarm runs out of food or hits a geographical barrier, the population collapses. They simply starve or revert to a solitary, low-energy state.
Interestingly, locust plagues are triggered by information. When locusts’ hind legs are touched enough times in a crowded environment, it triggers a hormonal shift. This is exactly like socioeconomic scaling. The “interaction density” of the crowd changes the behaviour of the individual to prioritize runaway growth over individual survival.
Non-life natural systems.
Super-linear scaling happens in things like nuclear fission. In a prompt critical state, the number of neutrons scales super-linearly with time.
In chemical explosions, the rate of reaction increases as heat is released, which in turn increases the rate of reaction.
The Outcome is a state of high entropy and energy dissipation. It eventually “exhausts” the kinetic energy of the flow unless more energy is constantly pumped in.
Back to stars.
Inside the core, the nuclear fusion rate scales super-linearly with the mass of the star. As a star’s size gets bigger, the internal pressure and temperature spike, causing it to burn fuel at an astronomical rate. This is the “Live Fast, Die Young” reality.
Earlier I mentioned that star’s surface area cooled at a sub-linear rate which is also true and hence a conflict. The reason stars of large magnitude are so unstable is specifically to do with this conflict of 2 scaling laws.
The instability of massive stars stems from a fundamental mismatch in how gravity and pressure scale as a star grows (‘grows’ means comparing stars of different initial masses, as they don’t grow like a plant, etc.). While a star’s mass (and its inward gravitational pull) increases with its volume, the outward radiation pressure required to counter that gravity increases far more aggressively, proportional to the fourth power of temperature (T4). In these giants, light becomes the dominant structural support rather than gas, creating a “squishy,” delicate balance where the outward push of photons nearly overcomes the inward pull of gravity. This forces the star to operate at the Eddington Limit, where it becomes so volatile that it frequently sheds its own mass in violent eruptions or pulses, eventually leading to a catastrophic structural failure when the core can no longer sustain the furious energy output required to stay inflated, as in supernova explosion.
Enough of large stars, there are books written about all this, suffice to say that having 2 different scaling laws applying at the same time make them very unstable.
Finally, let’s put it all together and get to the reason you’re probably reading this essay.
Human civilization has aspects of both sub-linear scaling like most life forms, and super-linear scaling like very few life forms and physical processes in the universe.
When did humans show the first signs of super-scaling? The answer might surprise some, but it was back in our hunter-gathering days, when there was enough social interaction of early religions that allowed the building of such places as Göbeklitepe in Turkey or Pivot Point in the U.S.A. Though super-scaling really took off with the towns and city states that developed with agriculture.
Every one of these city states, though, ended up collapsing as the growth in the socio-economic sphere of complexity outgrew the surrounding supply of energy and materials. Every anthropologist has their own description of exactly what happened with city states and their collapses, but they just about always stick to ‘human’ factors and certainly don’t embrace falling EROEI, and diminishing returns on materials, as playing an important role.
Prof Joseph Tainter, certainly does cover the increasing complexity of administration or problem solving, which acts as a tax on the prosperity of the culture, but doesn’t quite go as far as attributing a super-scaling aspect to this problem solving.
Fast forward to today’s civilization, where the complexity is growing at a growing rate.
With the help of A.I. I’ve created the following table…
Complexity Growth per 15% Population Addition
Statistics based on proxies including regulatory volume, R&D expenditure, and global supply chain nodes.
| 15% Pop. Window | Approx. Years | Complexity Growth (%) | Scaling Ratio | Major Driver |
| Window 1 | 1974 – 1982 | ~28% | 1.8x | Early Automation / Fuel Efficiency |
| Window 2 | 1982 – 1991 | ~42% | 2.8x | Personal Computing / Global Debt |
| Window 3 | 1991 – 2001 | ~65% | 4.3x | The Internet / Just-in-Time Logistics |
| Window 4 | 2001 – 2012 | ~88% | 5.9x | Carbon-Silicon Fusion / Social Media |
| Window 5 | 2012 – 2024 | ~112% | 7.5x | AI / High-Tech Governance (ESG) |
Everyone that has been around for enough decades, intuitively knows the above to be true in every facet of their lives. If you want to build a nuclear power plant, or a shed in your backyard, or sell some produce at a market, anywhere in the Western World, there are layers of more rules and regulations compared to a few decades ago.
Back when we bought our farm, if you wanted to put up an agricultural shed, you just built it. Now in 2026 you require a planning permit ($cost), which requires different experts to perform tests to make sure the land isn’t too steep, and the ground has the geotechnical strength to support the shed, plus bushfire overlays, environmental overlays, vegetation management overlays, etc. Then you apply for the building permit ($cost), that another expert must make sure all the engineering calculations, colour of building, appropriate materials, etc. are used. Then if you want to use the shed for any commercial purposes, more sets of rules come into play ($larger costs).
The above table, is just a best guestimate, but there are different actual statistics that back it up, like reports on ESG rules and regulations growth over the last 25 years, etc.
I’ve lost count of the number of politicians that promise if they are elected then they will cut the red tape for ….. (name your own businesses, companies, level of govt, etc) but it just doesn’t happen on any scale, as all rules, regulations, extra complexity are about ‘helping’ people or making everything ‘safer’ for workers, public, school kids, nurses, farmers, the poor, the homeless, the environment, the whales, the dolphins, the rare double breasted red herring, etc, etc, etc.
Where did this more recent explosion in the super-linear scaling of complexity come from? It’s easily accounted for by the internet that has made the social interactions of the whole world as if we were one large super city. Ideas, knowledge, concepts, stories, research papers all are instantly available around the world once posted online. Anyone here not think that a new set of rules or a tax thought up in Timbuktu won’t be recognized as a possibility in your own area very quickly if it serves a distinct purpose?
People will argue that the rules, regulations and increased complexity are a choice, and despite the increasing energy and material cost of these growing phenomena, it is a choice humans have made, so humans could also choose to undo it.
What they always fail to recognize is that money, debt, patents, stock markets, bond markets, religions, etc., are also just stories that humans have told ourselves and convinced each other are real, when realistically they are all part of the socio-economic fabric of the world we’ve built and are real as this super-linear scaling is what keeps modernity functioning.
As a civilization, we have super-linear scaled our use of energy, materials, and every socioeconomic metric, as we’ve grown to this scale on a finite planet. We have a 6 continent supply chain based on so many factories, processing plants, mines, banks, letters of credit, ports, ships, trucks, railways, flights, markets, organisations, trade blocks, that work in such a complex fashion, that it’s impossible to understand it all.
If there is anything we can learn from all other types of super-linear scaling it’s simply that they all end, and always very abruptly, compared to the time they were in the super-linear scaling phase.
Again I’ve used A.I for this last bit..
Is there any type of super-linear scaling that has ended gently?
There are no examples of super-linear scaling ending “gently.” In physics and biology, super-linear scaling is inherently unstable because it creates a positive feedback loop that accelerates until it reaches a physical limit.
In every known natural case, the ending is a discontinuous “break” or a catastrophic phase transition. Here are the three ways nature “ends” super-linear scaling:
The large star. It never “tapers off.” It burns faster and hotter until it hits the Iron Wall. The end is the Supernova—a sudden, violent collapse followed by an explosion. The system doesn’t “downsize”; it is physically obliterated, leaving only a tiny, dead remnant (a neutron star or black hole).
The bloom model of Algae or Locusts. These systems grow until they hit the Metabolic Ceiling of their environment. Because they have no “brakes,” they consume their host or their food supply entirely. The Result: A total population crash. 99.9% of the organisms die in a matter of days or weeks once the “Iron Wall” of resources is hit. The “scaling” ends in a wipe, not a transition.
The wildfire. A wildfire or a forest fire exhibits super-linear energy release as it grows (heat creates wind, which feeds the fire more oxygen). The Ending: The fire does not “gently” decide to become a candle. It accelerates until it either runs out of fuel or exhausts its oxygen. The Result: A sudden “flicker and out” or a massive “flashover” collapse. The system leaves behind a high-entropy state (ash) that cannot support any further scaling for a long time.
To conclude an already too long essay on a topic that deserves a book, this video of Prof Geoffrey West on Nate Hagens’ Great Simplification podcast opened my eyes to the world of scaling laws and its importance in our civilization.
On this episode, physicist Geoffrey West joins Nate to discuss his decades of work on metabolic scaling laws found in nature and how they apply to humans and our economies. As we think about the past and future of societies, there are patterns that emerge independently across cultures in terms of resource use and social phenomena as the size of a city grows. Does Kleiber’s law, which describes the increasingly efficient use of energy as an animal gets larger – also apply to human cities? How have humans deviated from this rule through excess social consumption beyond a human body’s individual metabolic needs? What could we learn from these scaling laws to adjust our communities to be more aligned with the biophysical realities of energy and resource consumption? Can an understanding of social metabolism impact our social metabolism?
I recommended you watch the entire video, but the most important part is from 32.30 to around the 42.00. Be cognisant that the scaling laws Dr. West refers to are inside the main residential areas and it seems from lots of research I’ve read to exclude the heavy industrial areas, which explains the actual amount of energy and materials our civilization uses.
Most of the video past the 42 minute mark demonstrates the usual human denial by looking for ways to overcome fundamental laws of physics that clearly show anything that grows exponentially (aka super-linear scaling) comes to a rapid end.
To conclude, civilization is a physical phenomenon, not really different to a large star that has both sub-linear and super linear scaling, nor that different to a locust plague or algal bloom, consuming every available resource until it reaches a limit, and then the entirety of the system just dissipates.
You will not find any physicists arguing that civilization is not an energy dissipative structure, so why should civilization end differently than any other energy dissipative structure?
Even in Prof Geoffrey West’s findings of scaling laws that apply to cities, he and his colleagues still find that “innovation”, being the important element (not total energy use), must keep increasing at a faster rate and still reaches a point of “singularity” anyway. Singularity is a polite physics term for collapse. (He explains this in the video link above anyway).
All past civilizations have collapsed, and some people like to use them as models for our potential slow collapse. However all past civilizations were agriculturally based for their energy in the cities, with the proportionally massive rural population living a mostly subsistence lifestyle, so could easily carry on exactly as they had prior to the town/city or state developing.
Even the Roman Empire at its peak only had around 2% of the population in Rome itself, with around 7% of the total population in all urban areas. Our modern world is vastly different to this, with the developed world often having 70-80% or more of the population in urban areas, and the farming relying upon all of modernity to take place. We have neither the skills nor the equipment/animals to go back to a subsistence type of agriculture, like those in collapsed civilizations of the past.
I attribute just as much human ingenuity to those living in prior civilizations as we have, yet this never stopped them from collapsing, nor did human agency, and we could argue that they had more agency than we do in modern democracies, as it’s easier to change rules and how people live in monarchies with absolute rule, than in modern democracies where governments come and go every few years.
To spread the scorn for stupidity around fairly, Tim Watkins thrashes his UK government today.
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2026/05/18/the-growth-trap/
Just got done with this and indi’s rant. All I could hear in my head was Nate Hagens pathetic voice, “What’s going on? We’re better than this.”
Actually I think Nate has a new saying for it. Something like “yes, this is what humanity is, but it’s not what humans are”. LOL, alright Nate, whatever you say.
Why does Watkins use that woman’s voice when he has one of the best voices on the planet? And where the hell is his comment section? Doesn’t Tim want to hear from people like me?😂😂
I have promoted and linked to Tim Watkins’ work probably 50+ times. He has mentioned my site 1 time and never linked to anything on un-Denial.
But that’s 1 divided by 0 which equals infinity more times than every other overshoot thinker has mentioned or linked to un-Denial.
So I have soft spot in my heart for Mr. Watkins.
I have a short blog rant ready to go on this topic after Hideaway’s more important post gets enough visibility.
Hint: Have you noticed the worldwide silence on CACTUS? It’s the same worldwide silence we heard on MORT.
They are the two most important ideas in the overshoot space in the last 50 years are both are ignored.
How is this possible? Seriously.
Rob I agree you are the best at promoting others and doing critical discussion. That is how I found your site originally.
I think one of us needs to start making video content. I keep thinking I should do it but I’m a busy lady!
Thank you monk.
My excuse is that I’m not charismatic to look at and am depressing to listen to.
My excuse is that I suck. This clip represents my constant mental state during that dark period when I was trying to make videos. (the last line is gold)
Thought I could pull a Sam Mitchell and just rant and rave for 20 minutes. I was so delusional I even bought a big whiteboard. Was gonna teach you guys a thing or two about overshoot.😂
For those of us not gifted with Sam’s improvising skills, I think the best chance is the Michael Dowd approach. Slide show presentation when it’s just you. And maybe some interviews similar to his post-doom conversations. Except we’ll call em post-extinction conversations. LOL
You have to use facebook to comment on Tim’s posts, on his Conciousness of Sheep page. It isnt very active there, which is a real shame because Tim is awesome. I agree he has a lovely voice 🙂
The US, for the most part, seems to be in the same boat as the UK, the biggest difference, being that the US produces more of its own energy.
Mike Stasse found this thoughtful aggressive Aussie rant about why Americans are so stupid and why the entire world hates the US now.
I skimmed it lightly it seems to have a lot of substance and anyone who hates the US might enjoy it.
I have no idea if it is correct. Citizens in all countries seem pretty stupid to me these days.
And for dessert I recommend another stellar rant against the US by Indi.
https://indi.ca/the-bust-out-of-america/
The previous I-won-you-lost-surrender-or-else threat didn’t work, AGAIN, so it’s been cancelled and replaced with a NEW even more super-serious threat, which means we can relax and enjoy modernity for a few more days.
Probably just a coincidence.
What is known about the attack on UAE’s Barakah nuclear plant?
Boy Rob, you really have to straighten this guy out. His run-on sentencing and lack of paragraph structure is almost as bad as I was once! But, under your disciplined tutelage, I was successfully reformed (with occasional relapses) so there’s no reason to doubt that you can correct this case as well. Too bad his content will still be shit but hey, at least it will be well formatted shit.
LOL!
There’s a lot of complicated raghead names in that threat. I doubt he’s lying in bed tapping out tweets on his phone. Someone must be in his bedroom helping him.
Ugh. Don’t want to go there, the imagery of DJT lying in bed is already sickening enough, not to mention the possibility of his having a bedpartner and what they might be doing to help turn out his tweets.
He’s probably dictating with his mouth full and a bucket of Kentucky Fried chicken next to him in bed.
I wouldn’t put stock into anything he says. Just enjoy modernity while it lasts.
Cool comment and analogy from zip over at C&E:
“Something About Longitude, Meaning, and the Island of the Previous Day”
Somewhere in the middle of the ocean, a navigator once looked not only at the stars, but above all at yesterday. At the last known coastline. At the direction of the wind. At the memory of earlier voyages. In reality, sailors navigated largely by remembrance.
That worked surprisingly well as long as the world more or less repeated itself.
But things went wrong in persistent banks of fog. Or storms. Or powerful currents. Suddenly nobody knew exactly where they were anymore. The ship kept moving, the sails were still full, the compass still functioned — but the position had been lost.
That was the great problem of longitude. Latitude could be determined reasonably well using the sun and the stars, but longitude was another matter entirely. For that, one needed time. Stable time. A clock that did not sway with the waves of the world.
Eventually, after countless shipwrecks, after centuries of wreckage washing ashore, lost lives and vanished cargoes, the answer was found. The breakthrough came after a major naval disaster near the Scilly Islands in 1707, when the British Parliament announced a prize competition to solve this problem of orientation.
Then John Harrison built his chronometer.
From that moment on, ships no longer sailed solely on memory, but on an abstract point of reference outside themselves. A clock that continued to indicate Greenwich time while the world itself kept changing. By comparing the local sun with that distant clock, sailors could calculate where they truly were.
Perhaps the same applies to our own age.
As long as the world appears stable, societies largely navigate by the island of the
previous day. By routines. By familiar continuity. By the assumption that tomorrow will resemble yesterday closely enough. The shops open. The petrol stations function. The ports operate. The lights stay on. Nobody needs to know exactly where the system is, as long as it keeps moving.
But the more complex systems become, the greater the risk of disorientation.
Then signals begin appearing everywhere: wars, empty hotels, expensive diesel, stalling industries, confusion of tongues, endless commentary, markets trying to reassure themselves.
And suddenly it becomes clear that a society may possess enormous amounts of information, while barely retaining a stable longitude of meaning.
Then people drift from incident to incident as if they were still sailing along yesterday’s coastline. That is the hidden crisis of our age: not only energy, not only economics, but the loss of orientation.
At least the old sailors still knew they could be lost.
Jon Jandai on youtube: “Think positive about collapse, it is more fun” , “not many people has a chance to see this”. “we are lucky”
Thanks, he has a healthy perspective on how to prep for bad times while remaining happy.
I like his video on how to cook rice with minimal energy.
Jandai seems like a really cool dude. I got some Charles vibes while watching it.
These are the types of people where it’s always worth looking for their detractors because you get to witness the highest possible level of ignorance/hopium in the universe. Case in point:
Money, debt, patents, research, rules and regulations, governments, manuals, astrophysics, anthropology, mathematics, physics, religion, economists, markets, finance, engineering, education, news and a myriad of aspects of modern life I’ve not included in the above list are all just stories we tell each other and most people believe in.
Some are true stories.
All the above stories, have developed over time and generations. We as a civilization as a whole over time, have developed people devoting more of their lives to the area they are interested in, eventually leading to specialists in each area as the stories grew.
Each of these specialists uses physical food, energy and materials. Even the part time practitioners spend less time on gathering food, energy and materials and more on stories that those just involved in their own existence.
All the mentioned stories now occupy most of modern humanities time, with every practitioner of whichever story always justifying how important their story is, to themselves as much as everyone else.
Of course this ‘importance’ to civilization as a whole means the rest of civilization needs to keep providing energy, food and materials to all these story tellers, so they can get on with their important stories, which just coincidently means relatively more energy, food and materials for those in their areas of important story telling and less for some other people, unless the overall story is a constant growth of energy, food and materials on a finite planet, which also just as coincidently, it always is…
Telling stories has always been less physically demanding than gathering energy, food and materials..
It’s always a good day when we are told a story by Uncle Hideaway. This story on stories was a more serious one but no less cherished in the whole anthology.
Gathering, processing, metabolising, and then dissipating energy, food, and materials, is a fancier way of describing my day so far of shifting stuff from point A to point B and then eventually back again!
Continued Hormuz closure and more destruction of energy infrastructure is probable.
When you think about the damage the US is doing to itself, and the wrath US leaders will soon experience from its citizens, you have to conclude that control of Iran’s remaining oil is short-term existential for the US.
Maybe the fracking decline and diesel scarcity is worse than is commonly believed?
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/uranium-transfer-nuclear-limits-us-issues-5-peace-ultimatums-iran
You are assuming that our leaders are capable of thinking that far ahead. I’m not sure that is the case.
Trump is not someone who will concede. Just look at his response to the 2020 US election. Given that track record, I fear that he is going to escalate the situation, and a lot more energy infrastructure in the region will be destroyed.
I very much doubt that Trump has the smallest input regarding policy and the conduct of the war.
I always remember Korowicz saying that the US had the best-informed planners he met from any country.
The US proposals are designed to be rejected, clearly.
Interesting essay by Wendy Williamson on how and why the financial markets are broken.
I’m not sure, but I don’t think she’s overshoot aware.
https://www.wendywilliamson.com/55-percent-and-rising
Quark is working very hard with another excellent essay on our overshoot predicament today.
https://rayonegro.substack.com/p/el-final-de-la-era-de-la-abundancia
So what was the real outcome of the Trump-Xi summit?
Do we even get to know?
Anyway, yesterday I watched “The Age of Innocence”. A boringly fascinating ruthless movie. Like for collapse, nobody talks about what matters the most, but still things get handled smoothly, rationally. And the most powerful persons are the least visible. There is absolutely no denial (innocence), except maybe from the main character. (but does he really try? Not very hard. He seems to be preserving his self-image. But I leave him the benefit of doubt, because I can relate 🙂
In any case, the scene at the opera, where they watch each other and gossip, was revealing (at 2:12 in
To do so, they are using what seems to be a LeMaire Paris Mother of Pearl opera glasses (https://www.ebay.com/itm/168368815167).
Isn’t this similar to what we are doing here, through fiber optic, distorting networks?
I guess I should have simply enjoyed the dresses…
Amazing. You see things that don’t exist for me. The conversations in this clip washed over me like white noise with zero comprehension.
They are not discussing anything that matters so it’s noise.
To Gaia and anyone else that might have doubts about Professor Jiang.
This is harsh take-down of Jiang’s predictions.
Assuming he is human, the first three are a given.😂
(uh oh. Might get some dislikes. But just remember, it’s not humans, it’s the blob)
yes I watched some of his interviews and I was not impressed at all by Jiang.
Fascinating, isn’t it, the phenomenon of the cult personality. There’s definitely something that’s wired in our brains to go along with whoever seems the most confident, often even bombastic, as long as you spout something that resonates with the masses who crave someone and something that will solve their problems or explain what they don’t understand. From an initial core group of followers, this can balloon out to a huge cohort who want to be seen as “in the know” and part of the tribe. Many religious figures in becoming the centerpoint of their respective religions have also benefited from this cult following tendency. The doctrine of the religion often develops long after the initial person has lived, but the mystique adds to the control narrative. The blind belief becomes proof of faith and tribal loyalty and at the same time shuts out others who do not subscribe to these beliefs.
This partly explains the exponential rise of this Jiang persona, it is considered “cool” to take his on-line courses and invite him on as many podcasts as can be scheduled. As far as I know he does not have a PhD and hasn’t earned the title of Professor but somehow that honorary has been bestowed on him and in a way gives his own followers more validation so they perpetrate it.
There is something really strange with the whole thing as he is ostensibly just making predictions based on his so-called game theory, but yet his pronouncements have such a polarizing effect. Jiang himself has stated that he is a very divisive person; there are many who vociferously oppose his predictions and his overall manner. The takedown by Larry Johnson is a great example, he lambasts the messenger along with the message without really knowing what kind of person Jiang might be. In being “crucified” by his attackers, his popularity will only increase, that is my own prediction based on how the masses have reacted in the past. By now he has generated enough of a cult following that they will sustain their belief in him, no matter how unlikely or unsound his ideas are. I think this is related to the mass formation tendency, time and again in history this has played out with individuals who may or may not have had any real substance but somehow captured the masses because of their message in time and place, and their personality. DJT is a glaring example.
Personally, I am not sucked into the Jiang cult following, but I did watch a few of his lectures and the odd podcast and I find some of his interpretations to be very interesting. Since it doesn’t seem that any one really knows what the hell is going on in the world anyway, his shtick on it is as valid (or invalid) as any! I think he is a very complex person who is not showing his true face and that may account for the love/hate vibes he generates. To my mind, he is on a journey of integrating his own world views with his own personal truths and there is still some serious disconnect. Being a product of both Eastern and Western culture probably also brings up a lot of conflicting issues. His super confident outward persona (and that is likely to be very irksome to many) may only be a front as he may actually be rather insecure (this is not an unusual presentation). I got this sense from the DOAC podcast where at the end he seemed very emotional when sharing about how he owes everything to his wife who believed in him during a time when his self-confidence was the lowest.
We are a funny species. As we hurtle closer to Cactus I think people will be craving whatever personality can promise a way out of the catastrophe, even if it is just blind hope. This is why a totalitarian new world order is predicted, based on the premise that when survival is threatened, the masses will fall in line. Time will tell, as always.
Namaste, friends.
That’s a great analysis Gaia.
We really do like to follow confident leaders with good stories.
None of the interviewers who marveled at his prediction successes noted that he has made dozens of predictions so you would expect him to get a few correct. No one dug in to find the wrong predictions. Truth is less important than a good story.
This quote by philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon sums it up perfectly:
“The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.”
All I know it that Cactus is gonna hit us big time, even though up till now it hasn’t quite doesn’t predicate it won’t, and probably will soon. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!
Namaste, friends.
Hideaway, you might like this deep dive by Craig Tindale into the chemical reagents used for mineral extraction and the impact of the Iran war.
https://ctindale.substack.com/p/the-global-reagent-squeeze-supply
It always disturbs me a bit when authors jump on a bandwagon, like the importance of sulphuric acid to mining of base metals. This is true for oxide ores, but false for sulphide ores.
Sulphide ores use the flotation method carried out in an alkaline environment, and constitute over 90% of base metal production. Base metals being copper, zinc, tin, lead, nickel. Strictly speaking Aluminium is also a base metal, except it is just dug raw and washed before processing, such are the grades of bauxite deposits.
Sulphuric acid is important for oxide ores that provide around 10% of base metal production.
Sulphur is important for flotation processes, not as sulphuric acid, but in the xanthates used to float the base metals. A xanthate is basically a surfactant made from an alcohol and carbon disulphide (CS2) Both the carbon and the sulphur for the carbon disulphide come from fossil fuels. While there is around a million tonnes or just under of xanthates used every year globally, the sulphur content is not a big issue.
Where the sulphuric acid really becomes important is with phosphate production into fertilizers, where around 145 million tonnes are required annually. The sulphuric acid used for mining the10% of base metals is around 40-50 million tonnes annually. Nickel has the highest quantity of oxide to sulphide production with around a 30%/70% split.
Interestingly the huge mountains of sulphur from the Canadian tars sands that have been growing since oil production there began, are now being used/shipped as the price of sulphur has risen high enough to make transport profitable for someone (diesel use). If you look at google maps of Fort McMurray area, around the processing facility at Mildred Lake, you can see large rectangular shapes that are piles of pure sulphur, waste product of tar sand processing. They are around 20 metres high and cover quite a few hectares in area, each pile.
LOL 🙂
I wondered if you might find a flaw in his essay that has the odor of AI.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-government-planning-dramatic-colorado-river-water-cuts-due-drought-overuse-2026-05-15/
US government planning dramatic Colorado River water cuts due to drought, overuse
I suspect that the recent, rapid growth in that region will come to an abrupt halt.
Just a hunch. If you accept MORT & CACTUS, and you keep going with it, you’ll probably end up at a point where the demented mind of James from Megacancer makes perfect sense to you. The survival drive aint trying to hear any of his bullshit. LOL. And if you keep going with it, Thomas Ligotti’s ramblings might even start to make sense. Oh the horror!
Even people with (partially) defective denial genes like Watkins, Hagens, and B… they’ll never get there. Ever!
Here’s a greatest hits album of some samples I’ve collected from James in the last couple of years:
The dissipative’s number one job is getting energy and resources for growth, maintenance and reproduction.
What is a dissipative? A temporary structure for accelerating the flow of energy from an energy gradient. That’s what both life and technology are – temporary structures for accelerating the flow of energy from animal/plant tissues and fossil fuels. Animal/plant tissues get reloaded from radiation resulting from the sun’s dissipation of the nuclear gradient of its hydrogen atoms. The human technological system which feeds its human RNA from the ecosystem will not be reloaded once it dissipates the fossil fuels.
The quest for profit and growth will continue as it has since the first organic cell fissioned.
Debt capitalism is the turbo cancer. It results in more dissipative structures and flow from the energy gradients than any other arrangement. Growth, profit, wealth, extinction.
Humans, being members of a hierarchical and competitive species, love to compete to dissipate energy. For a dissipative structure, more dissipation means more success. The production of progeny is fed by greater dissipation of energy. In their competition the humans like to display conspicuous consumption which is just a means to raise one’s stock in society. Even though the energy flow may be low, the impression of high energy flow may be sought. Private jets, large homes, whimsical trips across the globe and so on are meant to impress the other apes. They also accumulate and store wealth (gradient energy) for exclusive future consumption, regaling in the assurance of future dissipation although other dissipatives may have found ways to surreptitiously drain such honey pots.
The meaning of life: The reason for living is to maintain and carry forward the cytoplasmic, molecular splodge that started many millions of years ago as a molecular, energy-harvesting, looping metabolism. It made cells and it made you. You serve its needs and then your offspring, if you have any, take their turn carrying the torch or the cytoplasmic splodge. For what reason? No reason. Molecules don’t need reasons. The ordered, dissipative structure persisted by investing more energy in building and maintaining their structure than entropy could take away. However, entropy always wins in the end.
The dissipative’s crede is “smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em.”
From Brownian motion to coherent, energy-harvesting motion to dissipative structures in motion. The cells call out “Feed us, feed us you fool and copulate. Entropy works upon us and death awaits.”
It began a long time ago when energy harvesting molecules used that energy to reproduce themselves. Nothing much has changed. Your cells full of that cytoplasmic splodge have built brains that will harvest energy for them and reproduce just like the initial brainless, looping metabolism. If for some reason a person is not being successful they feel bad. If they’re doing well they generally feel good or are rewarded with natural opioids. Some pretty nasty tendencies or behaviors can circulate because they’re successful like scheming, scamming and flim-flamming. But basically it all came from nothing (a few molecules) and is still nothing although our brains are hard-wired to make it seem important and will even give us an ego to make sure we satisfy the system with “accomplishment”. That way we can feel superior in the human, competitive hierarchy and maybe get an edge up on the competition. Humans are metabolic automata.
Recently in our evolutionary history the cells have rearranged to create modern humans or human RNA at a scale larger than the molecular form found in our cells. We work in cells creating tools from information to be applied to the environment to get energy and build dissipative structures. In our current role we function as ribozymes or human RNA and our tools are like enzymes. Nothing new under the sun. The real hell will begin when the resources run out and/or we kill the ecosystem or we get sent to the front lines of a resource war. That would be a good time to become scarce. Leave your cell phone behind. Hell’s bells will ring.
As human RNA it’s our job to release energy from everything we can get our hands on, funnel it through the dissipative structures meant for the task and promote growth. Like a hurricane equalizing a thermal energy gradient we will be here one day and be gone the next. We release the energy and tear everything up in the process and then the process is over. Organic life is better for long-term trajectories because it uses the sun, changes slowly and recycles. However, there was a massive release of oxygen about 2.4 billion years ago from autotrophs that destroyed methane in the atmosphere and froze the planet for 300 million years. About 99.7% of life went extinct. I think it’s going to get hot this time. Evolution fooled around and released oxygen and almost offed itself. This time evolution created a human RNA, a homozyme, which will likely off itself and a good proportion of life. Thank God we invented reusable straws. That will buy us some time.
Dissipative structures with information evolve to maximize energy flow, power and reproduction. Rationality will not overcome innate biological behavior that seeks to increase energy/material flow especially when humans have evolved to become RNA and make tools to drain surplus energy from fossil energy gradients. Even as conditions deteriorate, even as growth ceases, people will struggle to maintain the homeostasis support system provided by technological civilization. The technological, homeostasis enhancing adaptations will eventually fall away leaving our soft, technologically evolved bodies vulnerable to the elements and the elements may be even more severe as a result of technological damage.
All of this information falls on deaf ears. The dissipative is going to dissipate until it can’t. That’s what it’s programmed to do. There’s no reward in restraint. Death and destruction is what’s going to happen to someone else. Information like “How To Get Rich from the Collapse.” should do quite well with the greedy meatbots always looking for an energy grabbing opportunity.
The homozymes must be kept in fear of God or they may no longer be “civilized.” Another word for civilized is cellularized (as in RNA working peacefully in cells without complaint.) There’s a reason why the savages were civilized, clothed, taught to read and put to work by the missionaries of God. Strangely most of them could read only one holy book whose foundational information was not a reflection of reality but rather a primer for tribal behavior. But nonetheless it shapes minds and behaviors, especially enhancing the sociability necessary for coexistence in the homozyme role. “We pray, we work hard (Calvinism), we serve the lord and we die.” If they could open their minds just a little they would see that they’re being used and abused by those that wield imaginary power of religion and the real power of capitalism and ownership. “Power and hedonism” for those at the top and hard work and God’s eternal reward for the legions of homozymes beneath them. With or without religion there is no new utopia, only dissipative structures individually or within a religion/tribe fighting for energy and resources.
Absurdism? Why absurd? Is it the fact that we’re an evolved elaboration on a looping, molecular metabolism following a long arms race of energy harvesting and dissipation by clueless, cellular automatons? Is it absurd that we now embark upon the technological competition which is apparently beyond our control to stop? Perhaps Shiva gets to decide who dances or who must dance. Why do we need meaning at all when mental programming seems to be adequate for most organisms? It’s likely that our mental model building capability, in service to technology, although of practical importance, has revealed the absurdity of our beginnings and our current cancerous, destructive existence.
PS. Since James is very cool in my book, this song seems appropriate cuz Tim Armstrong is the absolute peak of coolness.
James is a very cool guy, and is a master at creating insightful quotes. My favorites are:
James demonstrates why there is no need for us to waste money traveling in space to find aliens, they already live among us.
That has a definite ‘ska’ feel to it :
Good stuff. Love The Specials and Desmond Dekker.
The top comment made me laugh
Here’s a couple of fun ska songs.
Sorry but I have to add one more song. Haven’t listened to Propaghandi in a while. This song is from 1993. Same old story.
You speak of Rastafari
But how can you justify belief in a God that’s left you behind?
You simply fill the gap between the upper and lower class
And your faith merely keeps you in line, in line yeah
An amalgamation of Jewish scripture and Christian thought
What will that get you? Not a fuck of a lot
Take a look at your promised land
Your deed is that gun in your hand
Mt. Zion’s a minefield
The West Bank, The Gaza Strip
The West Bank, The Gaza Strip
The West Bank, The Gaza Strip
The West Bank, The Gaza Strip
Soon to be parking lots
For American tourists and fascist cops, yeah
Fuck zionism
Fuck militarism
Fuck americanism
Fuck nationalism
Fuck religion
They’re Canadian and were writing albums when I was buying buckets of cds and I’ve never heard of them.
The lyrics were written in 1993 and 33 years later read like they were written yesterday.
B is not buying into CACTUS yet.
https://open.substack.com/pub/thehonestsorcerer/p/the-hormuz-hangover-bend-not-break?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=yn9sg
“If we are lucky, or find the agency to put an end to the series of disastrous policies rolled out by our elected leaders, we might avoid a major clash over resources. If we are not so lucky, we might easily find ourselves in a similar situation which preceded WWII: an economic depression followed by the rise of authoritarian leaders promising to take what’s rightfully “ours,” or see “democracies” starting “preventive” wars to distract attention away from the economic malaise. The crisis and oil shock started by the war on Iran is not the end of the world in and of itself. It’s a crash course on how to live using radically fewer resources, and how to distribute what remains equitably. This crisis is not the end of the world, nor the collapse of modernity—but it could all too easily become the first major step towards that end.”
Thanks.
The essence of B’s view is:
1) growth is over
2) Hormuz will forced the economy to shrink
3) we can survive long-term at a much lower level
It’s not clear if B has read or understands CACTUS because he does not address any of the CACTUS points that claim he’s wrong.
CACTUS, like MORT, is a nuanced theory, and you can only tell if someone understands it if they are able to explain it, before they tell you it’s wrong. I have had several lengthy heated disagreements with people over the validity of MORT, only to discover in the end they didn’t understand the theory, most notably with Jay Hanson.
I do agree with B that Hormuz may not trigger CACTUS. We don’t know what will trigger CACTUS or when it will occur.
“I do agree with B that Hormuz may not trigger CACTUS. We don’t know what will trigger CACTUS or when it will occur.”
lets hope so Rob.
Emphasis on “may”. It could go either way.
I’m being cautious because all of my prior predictions have been too pessimistic.
I’m continuing to buy food supplies and spares of things I know I will need because high inflation is FOR SURE on the way.
doing the same.
Nate Hagens today on the biggest blunder in history and why he is feeling an overwhelming sense of dread that is impacting his ability to function normally.
Nate offers some good psychology advice on how to cope with overshoot awareness and dread, but does not mention CACTUS, which provides a clear explanation for why we should be feeling gratitude for being alive to witness the peak of what is possible in the universe.
Nate has spent most of his adult life trying to explain the human overshoot predicament, including writing an impressive book that catalogs dozens of contributing evolved human behaviors, yet he never mentions the two theories that provide definitive answers to the questions he studies: MORT and CACTUS.
How is this possible? Seriously.
Well, I guess it’s possible that MORT isn’t the explanation of the human tendency to deny reality. Even if it is, there isn’t anything to be done about it. CACTUS may have some approaches which limit the pain, so, yes, it’s surprising he hasn’t caught on to that yet.
I think that Nate just can’t cope with the banality of evil sort of things and that there is no solution to predicaments, just adjustment. That is why he constantly seems surprised by world events that further overshoot and such. Nonetheless he is a spectacular individual. My main gateway into peak oil.
Nate does have a very impressive mind. I’ve learned a lot from him.
I suspect Nate’s subconscious understands CACTUS, but his denial circuit is fighting it, and we are witnessing the struggle.
Isn’t ‘dread’ just a part of depression, which influences denial and bargaining?
All the talk of what we can or should do by so many in the ‘overshoot’ field seem to get depressed because they have not reached acceptance of our situation.
Reality hurts, it also diminishes your audience if you happen to be a ‘leader’ in the ‘overshoot’ field.
My current favourite piece of humour…
A cartoon of a person in a church praying, saying….
“Dear God. Please cure my son from his delusion of having an imaginary friend”..
This damn pic just doesn’t want to cooperate. Hopefully this worked.
You did way better than me, I couldn’t get the picture to post..
I noticed that I seem to be surprisingly calm about the Hormuz situation. My reaction was is largely one of passive acceptance. I’ve known for several years that we would use less energy in the future and now that moment has arrived.
I feel that my dread is more toward the loss of wild nature, than the idea of humanity using less energy.
I’m also calm. Too calm. I think I let my defense shield slip up a little cuz it seems like MORT shot a big load of denial into me. I think MORT knocked me up.😂
I’ve gone from being a frantic mess and making walmart prep runs multiple times per week… to being completely done with it all. No more prepping. No more worrying. Couldn’t care less.
Fuck it all. And besides, the elites will make sure USA is still running BAU. You posted that Colorado river article earlier… nope, nothing gonna affect me on that one either.
Yeah, I’m trying to be funny like normal, but I am serious about this. My survival drive freaked me the hell out in March/April. I was not expecting that kind of desperation & fearful response.
Whether its denial or me just getting control over my survival drive… it doesn’t matter, I just know that this feels much better than the craziness I was going through a month ago. Knots in the stomach. Shitty sleep. Smoking two packs a day. Waking up in the middle of the night just to write down something to buy tomorrow for prepping. Constantly thinking about collapse… none of that going on right now.
The normies might be onto something with this denial thing.😉
Lots of changes in your life. It’s good that you’re at peace again.
Dear Rob, do you think it is possible for collapse to elude you forever?
What would make you say: this is collapse, now?
I wonder.
Thank you.
Your brain frequently tries to make my brain think in ways that do not come natural.
My brain does not even understand this question.
Sorry. It’s probably, the way I phrased my question.
I will try a bit differently.
Remember this post https://un-denial.com/2026/03/12/ai-predicts-78-days-to-cactus-with-hormuz-closed/.
If it were a bet, on polymarket, how would you define the resolution rule?
The post started with:
If I am not wrong, 90 days ends in June. So 6 months later brings us to end of 2026.
So, does the claim amount to saying that by then, there will be no more internet, no cars, no planes, no trucks, no power plants, no high-tech military and a large portion of the world population (let’s say 50%+) will be starving?
I think it’s good to state it clearly. And then 7 months from now, we check the theory (if we can 😉
Hi Charles, I’ll be the first to state it’s will take longer than 6 months for total collapse, after the 90days of closure of the straight is taken into account.
Firstly because of this caveat in the post you referred to…
“Total collapse is delayed—but not prevented—by bypass pipelines.”
Then there is also all the storages in tankers, refineries, strategic reserves around the world still being used up, combined with higher prices that have reduced demand for oil, gas and products. Getting any A.I. to use all possible parameters is itself nearly impossible.
I, myself are very loathe to put an exact timing on collapse and always have been because of the myriad of unknowns and un-knowables within our system of civilization.
BTW, just yesterday I was asking A.I. myself about what happened to the 78 day timeline it gave in March. It started to come up with lots of excuses.
Hi Hideaway,
Thank you for the clarification.
But, then what can be said for sure? What can be reasonably predicted by CACTUS?
How fast is fast?
If only ranges, approximations, boundaries, probabilities are possible, it’s fine with me.
I ask because I find it interesting to verify the theory against reality.
I often think of collapse in terms of felling a tree..
Imagine a good straight tall tree, on a windless day. You cut the scarf at the front and start with the back cut. Then you put in wedges to hold the tree while completing the back cut leaving around 10% of the diameter of the tree as the hinge.
At this point an alive tree, is still alive and standing upright, it looks fine to a distant observer, no change from being 100% solid, despite the damage obviously done to it.
You then take a mallet or sledge hammer and drive the wedge/wedges into the back cut.
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Let’s assume you give it gentle taps, one after the other. Any one tap on the wedges could fell the tree, yet it also might take a lot.
Eventually you start hearing cracks of fibres breaking, you stop tapping and move away, yet the tree might stay standing. You move back, more taps, more cracking of fibres are heard. Eventually a crack of an important fibre breaking is heard and the tree falls within a few seconds, opening the cut and accelerating the top of the tree’s movement away from vertical.
When did the collapse of the tree start?? The final fall from 85 degrees near vertical to flat on the ground only took a few seconds, but did the collapse start with the scarf cut, or the back cut, or the first tapping of the wedge or the last tap of the wedge??
I expect the collapse of modern civilization to be very similar as are all collapses, slowly at first, then gaining momentum, then all at once towards the end in cascades of self reinforcing loops..
If you left the tree with just the cuts in place, and the wedges without tapping them, then eventually the tree will fall over by being blown over by wind, with no ‘help’ in driving in the wedges.
If you left the tree uncut, then over time it would either die and rot, then fall, or could have been blown over by a large storm. Collapse of every energy dissipative system is inevitable anyway..
Dear Uncle Hideaway,
Wow, The Parable of the Falling Tree will go down in history as one of your best! We’re just all here waiting to shout “Timber!” at the final moment before collapse.
Thank you for keeping us focused on the end goal, despite all our many distractions.
Hope you and your family are going well and enjoying these cooler days.
That’s a great analogy Hideaway.
Charles, I imagine we all have different definitions of collapse.
For me I will consider modernity to be collapsing when global energy use is falling in a clear year on year trend, and I will consider myself to be collapsed when I’m persistently hungry with no ability to get more food.
Thank you for this clear definition.
I guess modernity is collapsing. But, we can’t be sure until it’s in the rear-view mirror.
However, the personal part of collapse may elude you forever.
Best.
Thank you. I understand.
But this is still pretty vague.
Basically, all things die and death is sudden.
Isn’t it equally true that many things regularly birth from a small seed and some grow explosively at some point?
I predict a myriad of small bloomings at the time fast collapse kicks in 😉
Best.
Howdy HideAway,
Great post and comments, grazie mille.
Just took a 3-hour Matthew Dines podcast and a recent Jay Martin UAE swap-line presentation and had Claude integrate the insights; then ran it all across your CACTUS. It was a fun read this morning and included this unprompted tidbit:
Quote – The essay author’s observation that “as you move forward in time at some point super-scaling has to reach infinity as it’s exponential growth” is technically conservative — actual super-linear coupled systems blow up faster than exponential.
That’s above my paygrade, but it sounded like something you may have considered somewhere along the line.
Forgot to copy the sentence that immediately preceded that one:
Quote – The CACTUS feedback loop in point 9 — “many complex interdependent self-reinforcing positive feedback loops collaborate to grow civilization quickly” — is the mathematical signature of the super-linear scaling regime. Positive feedback loops with super-linear coupling produce hyperbolic, not exponential, growth. Hyperbolic growth functions reach infinity in finite time.
Just wanted to add a bit to the tree falling..
As you tap, tap tap at the bottom of the tree, the person with the most complete information will sort of know from another crack in fibres and see the tree ever so gently lift off the wedges, or look up in the sky to see a bit of relative movement against the background to know the tree has reached it’s tipping point and is on it’s way down.
The person from a distance away will only really know a bit later when they see the tree clearly moving away for the vertical that it’s falling.
The person at the base with the most information is clearly the one to know what’s happening earliest, while there is a delay of time until the person at a distance really knows it’s falling.
Even so the person at the base with the most information, doing the work, can know the signs when it’s falling, but never knows exactly which tap on the wedges will make it happen.
The inference for modernity is that we can see all the signs, but never have a hope of understanding every little aspect of strength and weakness within the system itself to know exactly where the tipping point is before it happens, but once it does happen you just run out of the way, as there is no way of stopping it past that tipping point.
I’m thinking the US federal reserve is at the base of our tree and we can infer what they see from their actions to get control of more collateral via war.
The US federal reserve is made up of economists. Their story that they are all true believers of, is that money is central to everything, and can fix everything with their control of it.
They are like an ornithologist looking at the tree from a distance and thinking that the tree doesn’t have any birds in it, so would make a good home for the local double breasted twit, and make a decision to put twit food in the tree, by climbing the tree themselves to do it. All that noise and shaking of the tree is irrelevant to them..
But they do know it’s becoming harder to service the US debt, especially when oil is sold for yuan, and they know a reset is in sight.
Thank you.
I just hope (and believe) it’s already past the tipping point.
Don’t give me that BS. You just want the info cuz you love to rub our face in failed predictions.😊 You know I’m only joking.
I’ll go on the record with this. My definition of collapse is when one of the big three go down, or start being heavily rationed; Power to my house. Water to my house. Local grocery stores being restocked.
Couple weeks ago I would’ve said by end of year or at the latest mid-2027. But now that I’ve been mysteriously pumped full of denial, 2030 is my new date.
But wait for the war to start ramping up heavily again. Betcha I’ll change my tune real quick.
Thank you.
Yes, it seems they may have stopped rocking the boat, for now. It’s funny how war does not seem to profit now that we are past growth. I think you feel this and that’s why you are calm again.
And yes, any of these things might happen in the near future, I guess. At least it’s a clear verifiable definition. And that’s what I like.
About water, I’d try collecting as much as possible in the soil. Not that it changes much if you are the only one experimenting with that. But that’s how trends start. You are in an ideal, challenging place to experiment with life. At your pace. It could really be fun (it would for me). I guess I would start by making the floor uneven (to retain rain water) and experiment with many plants to see which one can survive a whole year, unattended (I would start with the ones that grow naturally in the vicinity, even/especially those labelled weeds/invasive)
But, that’s only if you enjoy it.
About power and local grocery stores, many things are possible too. I guess what matters the most is doing what you enjoy, at your pace. It doesn’t matter if it fulfils only 1 percent of your needs. It may look useless, but it’s not.
For instance, when diesel runs out, it may be the time for small gasoline vans (donkeys?) to do small scale food transportation. I know somebody who does just that with meat. It reduces the cost of the distribution broker and allows smaller scale farms to even get to the market.
Etc…
I know, when the time gets right, you will start moving. And probably in a direction I hadn’t seen coming…
Thank you.
I put some answer up. But it said “awaiting moderation”.
Andril Zvorygin, the impressive leader of the only regular discussion by experts on overshoot, THE most important issue facing our species, posted a nice video today on God, without mentioning MORT, the only theory that explains why both human overshoot and God exist.
Why are so few people interested in Why?
How is this possible? Seriously.
Antonio Turiel today discusses CACTUS and MORT without mentioning either.
How is this possible? Seriously.
https://crashoil.blogspot.com/2026/05/silencio-radio.html
Tim Watkins today marvels at the idiocy of our leaders, and discusses coming second order effects of the Hormuz closure with some examples of CACTUS feedback loops.
He also reminds us why stocking caffeine is a key preptip.
Note that Watkins linked to work by David Korowicz but not the similar but more insightful CACTUS work by Hideaway. 😠
What do MORT and CACTUS have in common? Big new important ideas central to overshoot plus silence from every expert that studies overshoot.
How is this possible? Seriously. More on this later.
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2026/05/14/stage-two/
Tim suggests that “Last month I drew attention to how highly exposed the humble British cup of tea is to the growing energy shock, with the UK importing over 50 million kilograms of Kenyan tea every year. That tea crop relying on some 145 litres of diesel per kilogram along with up to 400kg per hectare of fertiliser to produce. With shipping fuel shortages looming, even if the tea could be produced, it may not get to these shores… and if it does, it will be at a much higher price.”
that can’t be right. I buy tea for under $20 AUD a kilogram. To buy 145 litres of diesel is around $200 before the war. He must mean a tonne.
Good catch. He repeated the error in the original article.
I asked AI how much diesel it takes to produce a ton of tea in Kenya.
AI said if you assume all power for the processing plant comes from diesel generators then about 150 liters per ton.
If you assume the plant is connected to the grid, then only about 50 liters per ton are required for transportation.
No1 used AI to scan the news feeds to summarize the 66 things he thinks are important for today. Then I narrowed them down to 4.
https://no1sdailydigest.substack.com/p/daily-digest-2026-05-15
I don’t really understand the financial markets other than to know they’re a story we made up. I did read his whole digest to see NVIDIA market value is $5.7 trillion. Now that’s a really “good” story the markets invented.
In case you haven’t heard of him, Simon Dixon is an wide-scope geopolitical analyst like Professor Jiang, that has a pretty good story that explains who really runs the world, why we fight wars, etc.
As with Jiang, Simon Dixon is blind to overshoot and CACTUS, so you have to connect some dots yourself to understand the complete story.
Gaza in 2023 vs Gaza in 2026.
The US provided all of the money and weapons used to renovate Gaza.
None of the people in charge feel like the did anything wrong.
The majority of citizens don’t give a shit.
The west has completely lost its ability to distinguish right from wrong.
I’m old enough to remember that we once knew right from wrong.
Damn!!! Gives new meaning to that famous quote: Forests precede civilizations, deserts follow them.
Is this real though? Top pic looks like a drawing. And my Empire Baby ignorance won’t let me believe that Gaza ever looked that pretty.
Even the bottom pic looks kinda weird. Too perfectly destroyed or something. But easier to believe that one than the top.
Are these photos of Gaza comparing 2023 with 2026 real?
Thanks for verifying.
Wow! That caption’s not exaggerating at all. Truly one of the most terrifying images in history
I read the featured essay again. Couple notes:
1) Rob’s summary of CACTUS at the beginning is excellent.
2) Hideaway is more effective at getting me to understand why there are so many ‘bullshit jobs’ than David Graeber was.
3) Got me thinking about those reindeer on St Matthew Island. We all know the story. Started with 29 in 1944. Peaked at 6,000 in the summer of 63. Two years later only 42 remained. Reasons for the supernova collapse:
https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/st-matthew-island/#page-1
Compared to the reindeer, my guess would be that humanity is currently somewhere between Jan ’63 – July ’63.
4) Renaee sent me this passage from Lyle Lewis’s book Racing to Extinction. It goes very well with Hideaway’s essay. The rest of this post is from Lewis:
“The Rocky Mountain locust may have been the most abundant form of life ever to sweep across the planet. A locust is a type of highly mobile grasshopper with the capacity to attain enormous population densities and a proclivity for aggregating and traveling in swarms. North America was blessed with a single species of locust. No known insect outbreak on the planet has ever approached the magnitude of the Rocky Mountain locust.
A swarm of locusts in Nebraska in 1875 covered an area of 198,000 square miles and probably numbered 3.5 trillion individuals. Locusts naturally experience explosive population fluctuations. Outbreaks and crashes are triggered by their own population dynamics. A locust swarm had an apparent randomness that could shred one part of a county and leave the remainder untouched.
Swarms of these insects swept across the prairies, at one time reaching from southern Canada to the Mexican border and from California to Iowa. They were just as powerful a life force as the great herds of bison. So thick and massive were the swarms, they could turn noon into dusk. The last outbreak, 1874–1877, wiped out over half of the agricultural production in the United States west of the Mississippi River. The locust shaped the cultural history of the western United States. So deeply rooted were these insects in the consciousness of Western culture that the European settlers of America were destined to interpret the Rocky Mountain locust infestations in profoundly religious terms. Locusts are mentioned in the Bible 36 times and the Quran twice, usually as a manifestation from God disciplining his people for some perceived injustice.
Pioneers and government agencies tried every imaginable method of control. They prayed for deliverance, organized bounty systems, conscripted able-bodied men into “grasshopper armies,” and provided food aid to starving communities. Farmers tried to burn and beat the invaders, drowning and plowing eggs or crushing and poisoning the hatching locusts, all to no avail.
While the Rocky Mountain locust disappeared as a dynamic phenomenon in 1875, the swarms continued to pummel America’s heartland into the 1880s, moving and settling with the whimsy of tornadoes. Their devastation was like that of a living wildfire. Fifty to 100 tons of vegetation per day were consumed by a typical swarm. Finally, in the 1890s, to the relief of beleaguered farmers, the locust outbreaks subsided. When a small swarm was reported in Manitoba in 1902, people wondered if another period of devastation was at hand.
Nobody could have guessed that the Manitoba swarm would be the last locusts seen in North America. Suddenly and mysteriously, the Rocky Mountain locust disappeared. The last two specimens were collected by a man in Manitoba, Canada, on July 19, 1902. In just 25 years, it went from a biological marvel to having disappeared forever.
In an outbreak cycle, the locust swarms descended from the northern Rockies in early June. These insects swept across the countryside, settling wherever there was abundant food. As the locusts advanced to the south and east, they began to mate, and soon after, the females began laying eggs. The swarms left behind denuded grasslands riddled with eggs. The adult locusts would live for perhaps a couple of months, seeding the countryside with the next generation. The embryos would mature through the summer and then hibernate during the winter. The following spring, the nymphs hatched on warm days forming into immense aggregations or “bands.” These immature locusts would march across the land, stripping the vegetation to fuel their development.
This next generation would ride the winds further into the heartland of the continent. After a three or four year buildup and an equal number of generations, the outbreak would enter its final stage. Stretched to its southern and eastern limits, a portion of the population would stream back to the northwest in an apparent effort to return to its mountainous homeland, the Rocky Mountains. The locusts managed to endure somewhere in the mountains, biding its time until conditions were again favorable for an eruption.
The locusts flourished during droughts when hot, dry weather weakened plant defenses and actually increased the nutritional value of the vegetation. The dry conditions also suppressed fungal diseases, which could devastate locust populations in wet years. The heat accelerated the locusts’ maturation and development. In times of drought, lush vegetation was restricted to shady depressions that captured more moisture than surrounding areas. The locusts were forced to aggregate in these swales, a behavior that initially generated and then sustained the coherence of both nymphal bands and adult swarms. Outbreaks of the Rocky Mountain locust typically lasted three to five years.
It wasn’t until nearly a century after the last documented locusts in Manitoba that Jeffrey Lockwood, a resourceful scientist at the University of Wyoming, solved the mystery surrounding their extinction. After nearly a decade of scientific detective work, Lockwood discovered the locust had been extremely vulnerable to even small-scale human disturbances during periods between outbreaks. The fertile river valleys of the mountainous west represented a sanctuary where the locust had always found what was necessary to persist in the face of adversity.
Small geographic areas that sustain populations are termed ecological bottlenecks. A population of any plant or animal is only as safe as its weakest link. An ecological bottleneck can spell disaster for a species if the compression of its numbers occurs in a time and place where human disturbance is likely to occur. Farming and domestic livestock grazing in the valleys near streams and rivers in the Rocky Mountains were primary contributors to the demise of the locust.”
Thank you for finding this super interesting story.
It’s ironic that one species of locust extincted another species of locust.
Quark explains how abnormal the markets have been since the 2008 GFC, and they’re becoming even more abnormal.
We are in the middle of the worst energy and key materials crisis ever, and the stock market doesn’t care.
I explained the Hormuz risks to a friend and he replied that I must be wrong because his stocks are doing fine.
I’ve been expecting a major stock market correction for 15 years to acknowledge slowing real growth and unsustainable debt, and it hasn’t happened.
Clearly my understanding of how the world works is wrong.
Maybe it’s related to CACTUS?
Maybe there will be no correction until the supernova because any correction will cause the supernova.
Maybe the central banks understand this.
https://rayonegro.substack.com/p/nunca-habia-ocurrido-esto-al-mismo
I would add to Quark’s list:
7) Peaking US fracked oil.
8) High probability Iran war will restart causing more gulf infrastructure damage.
Karl Denninger weighs in…
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=255414
Do people honestly believe Nvidia is worth $5 trillion or are they all just playing the “greater fool game”? The lack of common sense is bewildering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-subprime-ai-crisis-is-here/
This article argues that OpenAI and Anthropic would never be profitable if they actually had to offer their services at market value.
I’m just a little bear with a very little brain but it seems to me that the very top elite have doubled. tripled, and even quadrupled their wealth in these crazy times and that is the main function of the crazed stock market–to insulate them from any future collapse, hyperinflation, reset, what have you. They will know when to pull out as they’re the ones in the position to rig it in the first place (as it obviously has no basis in reality), and the hell with us and our measly retirement funds going up in smoke. It’s the easiest, and currently safest (as they decide how it goes up or down) way to make money, especially if you have billions to work with, a few percentage points can mean hundreds of millions and then compounded again for the next rise or fall. The way the game is played, they can win either way and they will have the most to convert into the next instrument of so-called wealth holding when the dust settles, or so they think. In the meantime, might as well drive it higher whilst they can, make hay when the shine shines as they say. The rest of us just have to go along with them, and it will be our piddly claims on future wealth that will be wiped out.
Of course, with Cactus as the great equaliser there will be no holding of wealth if all systems collapse, but no one thinks this. Even if the elite has some inkling they probably believe they will be able to ride it out and still come out on top. I daresay this is the position of the US, the world will suffer a great recession/depression from their machinations but they will still have the advantage somehow and be able to take top pick from the spoils so it is still a win.
My suggestion echoes Rob’s–buy more sardines! This is now the metaphor for just converting any fiat wealth into something real and needed as soon as you can, whilst we can. Anything to help you and your family live another day in more comfort, be that day in the near term or later, that still has value to your life and after all, what is money for? Or, for those who can and have the inclination, give some money to someone you care for whose life you can help now. We still have the ability to choose how to be kind, generous, and grateful, hopefully through the end.
Namaste, friends.
that is make hay when the sun shines, of course. does it irk anyone else to catch typos in their post after sending? I know there’s a way somehow to edit your own post but as a bear with a very little brain that is beyond me.
Do you see the “Reply” button at the bottom of your post? Hover your mouse over it and look to the right and will see a character that looks like a gear or asterisk. Click it and you will see an edit button for making changes to your post.
Think of the sardines, though, Gaia, and the ocean ecosystem that is overfished ,and becoming even more exploited. The sea-bird populations that are plummeting because all the sardines and other fish are being consumed by the ravenous, fossil fuel-powered human juggernaut. There’ll be a collapse of the human population in the next few decades, anyway, so from the point of view of all the rest of the life on Earth, it would be better for it to happen now, before the biosphere becomes even more devastated. Not that what I think matters a jot.
The juggernaut will roll on until it can’t.
Hello dear David,
I totally hear you and am in the same boat thinking that humanity’s enterprise should collapse sooner than later for the sake of the biosphere. It seems that no matter what we do now, it only prolongs the agony for all concerned. As you know, sardines are quite safe from me but beans aren’t! So looking forward to seeing you and J tomorrow then. Our games afternoons are a welcome respite from the reality at our door.
Going back to both the GFC and the covid collapse in markets, before the downdraughts in stock prices it was pretty obvious the markets were going down.
Watch “The Big Short” or read the book for how the market stayed irrational for far longer than those that saw was coming expected.
Then during Covid it was obvious that markets would have to crack, with lockdowns and business disruptions all over the world. However markets kept making new highs as the situation became worse during February 2020, until one day out of the blue they started to fall, and then fell 40% on the indices over 1 month.
I tried to short the market in early February 2020, was stopped out, had a second go a week later, stopped out again, then had a third go around the 20th February, which did work..
Currently insider selling of S&P500 outweighs buying by around 4:1, while volume of stock traded and stocks making new highs compared to new lows is also around record levels. Plus long term bond yields rising..
In other words, all the classical signs of an approaching major market high, already exist. It’s only a matter of ‘when’ it breaks, with something shown to be the ‘catalyst’ only in hindsight.
While markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, they cannot stay irrational forever, eventually they run out of bigger fools…
https://lylewfass.substack.com/p/bring-me-the-matriarchy
I liked this essay (h/t Eric Michaels). I know I’m guilty of being misogynistic most of my life. And I completely agree with the author, let women be in charge of the world for once. But I also know that the MPP has something to say about this ridiculous pipedream.
If you love the blob, you just have to accept that this is the way it is… everywhere in the universe… good lord! How can you be in love with that?😂😂
Women are no different than men when they achieve power:
I worked in a female-dominated workplace for several ears, the commercial offices of ‘The Guardian’ no less, in London.
The managers were 90% female, at every level, the Big Boss a woman, and the environment was corrupt. I learnt that:
Power corrupts absolutely, whether male or female.
Women are no kinder, more honest,ethical or unambitious than men, and certainly no less greedy.
Time to give yeast a chance.
Good morning friends,
This seems the perfect place to segue into today’s must listen podcast. I am finding that a morning dose of Glenn Diesen’s guests is as necessary for my constitution as the first check-in at un-Denial.
I have listened to Prof Desmet during the throes of the Covid crisis and his theory of Mass Formation was scintillating then, but now with the continual unfolding of our global crisis, his explanations make even more sense and are ever more relevant. If you listen to only one of his discussions, this would be a good choice, and Glenn is an exceptional mediator given his own high intellect, communication skills and experience.
Humans will human given the right environment (give yeast a chance, I like that!) and the current global terroir will foment another predictable reaction perhaps in a scale and ferocity not yet seen. Totalitarianism seems the only chance for some form of continued societal order but if that is our future, then may we pray for Cactus to relieve us first.
My suggestion–head for the hills! This is a good time to practice misanthropy (not misandry or misogyny), and hopefully avoid the mobs with pitchforks for as long as possible (if only the masses still had useful handtools that could be used for farming, I fear it will be guns in hand now).
Namaste, everyone.
Thanks, I’ll listen to it.
Diesen is my favorite geopolitical podcast now.
He is genuinely curious and open minded and tries to understand the truth of what is going on, and most importantly, why.
If anyone gets a chance, please introduce him to MORT and CACTUS. I’ll bet he bites. He has high integrity and might even have defective denial genes.
Hi Gaia,
had just downloaded this. I am keen to hear how he approaches the current situation. James H Kunstler is an interesting example of not seeing the full picture. He spouted Desmets views about mass formation for covid but seems to be completely unaware that he has fallen into it with regards to Iran. Very strange.
I suspect Mattias Desmet is correct about his mass formation theory but I also think his description of the theory is unnecessarily complicated, perhaps to justify his PhD on the topic.
Does anyone have fewer and simpler words to explain Desmet’s theory?
All we are saying… is give yeast a chance
Young US citizens used to protest against war and the government ignored them and continued its wars.
Now young US citizens don’t bother protesting, even when their government funds genocides or murders 160 schoolgirls.
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/humanity-yeast-cells/
I would rather nominate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desulforudis_audaxviator
In my opinion (as a woman) there is nothing special or espcially different about women when it comes to leadership. This idea that women are somehow more morale is often used as an argument to stop fair and just critisism of women leaders. Also having worked in large orgs i would say the women that rise to the top are a different sort of person from the average woman, just like is the case wtih men.
Women’s mental health has been declining in western countries worse than men’s.
Spot on, when I was reading about this, the data pointed to exactly that re the impact of social media on girls and women since 2010 onwards (start of fb and insta and smart phone with camera)
I did not read the whole thing, just skimmed it. I could have written something like this myself if i put my mind to it. I have been down this path, and it does not hold interest for me now, there is something deeper underneath, and you are right to point to the blob. Or just to the terror of existence and the ground zero pyschological damage of being here at all and how we deal with that throughout our lives.
I listened to a talk by Martin Butler yesterday about the Will to Live (the blob, blind force of nature) and how this manifests in the sex drive and therefor human behaviour. He gives the example of swallows. The female swallow seeks out the alpha male in order to have the most robust and powerful offspring, but then abandons the alpha and looks for a more docile and weaker male sparrow and lets him inseminate her (tricking him) and then they build a nest together and raise the chicks. And many draw similarities between sparrows and human behaviour. All this talk about animal drives and how it effects behaviour is operating, but there is also a way to become aware of this, with our meta consciousness and therefor temper it, to some extent, but it takes enormous force of reasoning and observation and in my experience only occurs after the fact, toward the end of life, after all the mating behaviour has played out, and you can reflect on it all.
How it effects politics and socials arrangegements and equality, if I am really honest with myself, I see that I don’t care, only so many fucks to give. If I was a person who cared deeply about it, I would be joining some groups or writing about women’s rights etc. (which i did briefly) If you have been directly impacted by horrible male abuse, then this will shape your whole life and may result in it being the dominant narrative, and I have read books by women like this. Particularly over the last few years when trying to understand women transing to men and what is the driving force behind this. In fact this was the thing that nearly turned me to a full blown rad feminist, but in the end, i could not go there.
Funny after thought, when i was reading this, at first i thought it was Lyle Lewis and i was thinking – he should stay in his lane!
Many good things about matriarchy.
But my sister in law thinks women is a main driver for increasing comfort.
Women chooses (If she can), men who can provide more comfort (more fire).
Many places women can not choose and is forced to have many children.
Just go on any popular dating site and analyze who women find more attractive: degrowth males or growth males.
The center-left magazine the Atlantic admits that the US has lost the Iran war.
https://archive.ph/U2iiO
You can see where western democracies are headed. You may be charged with treason for reporting the truth. Europe is doing similar things already.
“If the truth kills them, let them die.”
Quark is good today.
He argues our leaders have made a decision to accelerate until we crash.
I’d say he’s partially correct.
CACTUS explains the supernova is not a decision. The supernova is a physics driven behavior of our system and no one is driving the bus.
https://rayonegro.substack.com/p/no-hay-plan-b-vamos-hacia-la-autodestruccion
Economists mistakenly believe that when a raw material or fuel becomes scarce, price increases will lead to something else replacing it.
In the case of general depletion, this does not work. The law of diminishing marginal utility (Gossen’s law) applies—the first cut is the deepest.
Extracting the scarcer, deeper-lying, less productive, and harder-to-extract raw materials requires greater complexity, effort, and resources.
The costs and effort involved in obtaining raw materials and fuels are rising.
Even so-called renewable energies require enormous amounts of non-renewable raw materials and fossil fuels. Total consumption of oil and gas is not falling; it continues to rise.
At the same time, we must work to combat wear and tear, environmental destruction, and global warming. For some time now, all of this has only been possible through higher levels of debt, which is becoming increasingly unproductive and unrepayable.
The bonds that governments use to finance themselves must offer higher interest rates to offset the growing risk. Once the bonds are considered junk, only central banks can buy them. This increase in the money supply fuels inflation heavily, which ultimately renders currencies worthless. Money disappears, and trade and the economy collapse.
There were no significant small decentralized structures that could prevent social chaos.
Saludos
el mar
Nice summary.
Discussions between Hagens and Berman are usually good.
I’ll be back with notes after I finish this if they say anything intertesting.
They went darker than normal in this discussion.
My notes:
https://www.sott.net/article/506243-Three-days-left-to-prosecute-Anthony-Fauci
Three days left to prosecute Anthony Fauci
Fauci’s going to get away with it.
So are the health officials and doctors here in Canada that followed his lead without switching on their brains and asking simple questions to check if what Fauci and friends told them was true.
The entire healthcare profession is an incompetent disgrace.
LEGO crew screwed up.
@Renaee, Are you on Discord by any chance? I got a friend request from someone with that name.
Yes sent that through a couple months back. I used to be on there, but have not used it since around 2022. It was when we were attempting to compile cactus theory into a book and i thought it could be a better way to communicate. So I logged in and searched on yr name as I know you post links from discord sometimes.
I just accepted it. I also sent you an invite for a collapse discussion server.
Gail Tverberg today discusses the upcoming Trump/Xi meeting in the context of energy depletion and the need to reorganize the world to reduce energy consumption.
Tverberg does not seem to understand CACTUS because she implies it will be possible to retain modernity, and to reduce energy consumption, by dividing the world into smaller independent trading regions.
It seems to me that CACTUS clearly states that Tverberg’s hopeful plan will fail due to a reduction in scale and therefore a reduction in both efficiency and the growth of resource extraction technology complexity.
Gail also seems to believe a significant reduction in complexity and scale is imminent and survivable for the majority, which conflicts with another CACTUS prediction.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2026/05/12/china-and-us-trade-talks-a-solution-for-oil-shortages/comment-page-1/#comment-508879
LOL, what a world we live in. 😂😂😂
Tverberg linked to a video by Professor Marandi on his YouTube channel.
I’ve been following Marandi daily since the war started and I did not know he had a channel.
I just checked and the video that impressed Gail is an AI.
No idea if Marandi approves of the channel but it’s not him.
I have noticed these impersonating channels for him too. Anyone famous now has to contend with them.
” Then there are outbreaks like a locust plague or an algal bloom. When a “pulse” of energy (like nitrogen / phosphorus runoff ) hits water, the algae population scales super-linearly. They use the excess energy to replicate at a rate that ignores the usual ” checks and balances “.
The nitrogen and phosphorus is supplying the nutrients required for cellular growth, not energy. The energy for the growth of the algae is supplied by the sun, via photosynthesis in the algal cell. The growth of the algae was initially limited by nutrient availability, but when that limiting factor is removed, an algal bloom results (Liebig’s Law ).
David H …. “The nitrogen and phosphorus is supplying the nutrients required for cellular growth, not energy.“
How were the nutrients concentrated into a form useable by the algae without the use of energy?
Did I go into explanation of the entire process, absolutely not, that’s probably a book by itself.
Whether it’s by geologic and other life processes, or just by humans dumping of these nutrients into the water, the concentrated levels come from energy consuming processes.
Likewise for the locusts, unless the nutrients were available, the plants they fed on would not be around in the quantity necessary, for the rain to make prolific growth, which allowed the locusts to grow enough in numbers to stimulate each other into plague proportions.
Even stars, the potential energy they give off is always there in the gas clouds before the star forms. It takes gravity and rotational forces of the galaxy itself to coalesce the gas into stars, that then have a lifespan of complexity until the energy is dissipated, not the protons, neutrons and electrons as in the material, though even some of those are changed into some of the energy.(again another book required to describe it all in detail!!)
Humans have had fossil fuels for 100,000 years, but were unable to use them effectively until all the conditions were met for our use of them, which included (not limited to!!) fire, language, religion, metallurgy and agriculture. Again a book or series of books..
Basically the super-linear scaling seems to apply when all the right conditions are met to allow it to happen, compared to when only some of the conditions are met, plus also have some negative feedback loops present, we get sub-linear scaling.
As soon as one of the conditions precedent that allows for super-linear scaling falls short the super-linear scaling collapses, because it needs the entirety of the system to exist, not just one or 2 parts.
That’s fine, Hideaway. I wasn’t sure if you wanted to make that section a bit more clear, for people reading it. The immediate cause of the algal bloom is increased nutrient availability, but if you want to leave it like that, referencing energy without the mention of nutrients,that’s your decision. I appreciate that
it’s difficult to cover all the details in a broad-spectrum article.
All the best.
I agree there are so many important details left out, yet it was 15 pages long (on a word document) anyway, which is getting too long for a simple post.
I think you’ve missed the point that ‘nutrients’ only exist because they are elements/materials concentrated enough by energy processes anyway, so still part of the energy input, just a stage earlier.
I didn’t explain myself well. I thought that some people might read that section and think that the main source of energy driving the algal growth was from the nutrients , rather than the sun.
Good point about the “embodied ” energy.. Thanks.
Writing for a general audience can be tricky. Do you use scientific terms in a very precise way, or mix in everyday language to make the idea clearer? “Energy” regularly gets used metaphorically in everyday lanague. A lot of the time your choices will depend on your audience and what you trust them to understand.
Hi Monk, I realistically have no clue where the technical level should be aimed at, I’m just guessing.
David H has raised some very legitimate points about aspects, while some others found it a slog to get through.
Anyone with a scientific background will very quickly notice no references at the end, and that’s also deliberate. I could have included 3 pages of references, but this isn’t a scientific paper.
While I was really up with including references many decades ago when I was a student and teaching, after doing all the work on the EROEI method I came up with, I became really suspicious of so many papers that justified their existence, by quoting numbers from others and including lots of references, that turned out mostly useless.
I went through hundreds of references, and then references of references to find how they had worked out some base numbers, but paper after paper just referred to what was worked out by their reference, which was only quoting others. No actual working out of the energy input numbers.
I ended up finding that many papers referred to ONE paper from M. J. De Wild-Sholten back in 2005, which had massive holes in the calculations, and not that relevant to 2022, yet it was cited as the source for information in references of references of references.
I think you did an excellent job. I totally agree about following sources back. As an example, there is this diagram that is very popular with climate change people. I was very disappointed that after going back through references, it was just something made up by the UN, and not based on academic research. This diagram had been shared by many PROFESSORS on linkedin. It was also shared by the Guardian
Here is the Guardian article about it: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/worlds-richest-10-produce-half-of-global-carbon-emissions-says-oxfam
Well done Hideaway! This was really easy to understand and helps put it all in perspective. It is kind of funny comparing us to suns – not even those massive entities can get around the laws of nature, so why would we be able to?
Hey monk. I finally listened to that No Way Out podcast w/ Tim Watkins you posted a couple weeks ago. Was really good. And cool that he mentioned Rob.
Tim’s voice is phenomenal. I kept waiting for him to make fun of Alex Trebek. 😂
Omg 😆
When did you go from Chris to Christ? Do you need to go on an ego-killing retreat with Nate or something?
Have you been living under a rock? The name change was the talk of the town. The mainstream media even covered it. LOL
This infamous thread explains how it happened:
https://un-denial.com/2026/05/02/limericks-of-cactus/comment-page-2/#comment-119899
Oh haha I remember that
Hi Monk, thanks, it’s not easy trying to come to a compromise between all those that do not have a technical high level scientific knowledge and those that do. None of the complexity of our situation is that easy to explain, simply, without leaving out huge gaps.
“It is kind of funny comparing us to suns – not even those massive entities can get around the laws of nature“. Exactly, which is one of the main reasons I often use them as examples!!
Stars have mastered fusion (without any thinking involved!!) humans (with lots of thinking) haven’t. Even if we were to ‘master’, fusion, it’s obvious we require a lot more materials to do so, of much higher order than a star. (just look at what’s being poured into ITER)..
Yet somehow ‘thinking’ (as in ingenuity, innovation, technical expertise, whatever) is going to get us out of our predicament according to the mainstream narrative.
And suns have an order of magnitude more energy than we could ever dream of having control over too
This comment from Michael Campi made me laugh. So true. On the rare occasion when I run into an old friend and we’re catching up on life, the moment I tell them that I purposely haven’t been in a relationship in almost 20 years, as well as no human contact in that time… with their reaction you’d think I just told them that I have a terminal disease. LOL!!
Sometimes after along spells of solitude I wonder if I made a mistake by walking away from many relationships, for various reasons, but lately mostly over whether it was a good idea to transfect billions that did not need protection with a novel mRNA gene therapy that had failed every prior attempt to commercialize it.
However, after some quality time with my few remaining friends and family I find I seek time alone again.
My conclusion is that there is no one right way to live with or without others.
I think the answer is to be satisfied (and if you’re lucky, maybe even happy) with however you are living.
A lot of people think oil prices are being manipulated lower than they should be, or that markets are denying risks.
Art Berman argues the oil market is functioning correctly.
https://www.artberman.com/blog/the-price-isnt-right-fundamentals-dont-support-100-oil/
Alice Friedemann today…
https://energyskeptic.com/2026/more-and-more-and-more-one-of-the-best-books-on-energy-ever-written/
I read what Alice noted from the book, and all I could see was the super-linear scaling of so many aspects of modernity that are highlighted and the feedback loops from one material to another.
I have the e-book if you need a copy.
Already found a pdf and downloaded it. I’ve seen a few Youtube videos with Jean Baptiste Fressoz and did mostly like them..
Nate Hagens has a long essay today arguing that a small percentage of the population can shift civilization in a positive direction by choosing degrowth and setting a lifestyle example for the majority to follow.
It’s a pleasant story, but is it true?
Hagens does not explain why CACTUS is wrong and why degrowth is physically possible for any form of modernity, nor why a species can override both its evolved MORT and MPP behaviors.
Maybe truth doesn’t matter.
Maybe what matters is believing a nice story to stay sane and functional.
https://natehagens.substack.com/p/essay-10-qualities-that-could-change
Good morning Rob and friends,
What a lovely fairy tale that Cousin Nate tells! I’ve written on this before but in the 27 years in which my husband and I have spent countless hours (as in all available weekends and much holiday leave) and nearly all disposable income building up our homesteads, there has not been a single other “normie” family that we know (and know us) who has woken up to emulate our lifestyle. Sure, they love the offerings of fruit and short visits to our places in the country, but none outside the already self-sufficiency leaning circle have made any consistent and persistent lifestyle changes. Modern life without all the physical work and extra expenditure for things that are so readily and cheaply gotten at the grocery store is just too complacent and easy.
Of course this may very well change in a hurry but I fear that scenario will be too little, too late. And in the blind panic for survival, there is every chance that “pioneer” cultural mitochondria like us (what a sweet image, really, almost as endearing as a paramecium) will be swallowed up by other forces that figure the best way for survival isn’t to learn from our experience, share our resources, and consolidate our energy but just take as they can, here and now.
Can you say, pass the hopium pipe, please?
Namaste, friends.
Very well said Gaia. I just finished reading Nate’s pretty fairytale, and was in fact reminded of Chris’s post a few weeks back, Springtime for Charlatans, as it is a deluded fantasy even though he means well. If he was a charlatan it might even be better, but no, he is high on his own supply. Sometimes the supply runs out and then we hear a glimpse of reality, but mostly he will not look sqaurely at the nature of our species and therefor is sewing a world of dissapointment and pain. It’s not what the world needs right now at all. And yes you are very well placed in your position to have direct evidence of this. I hope you enjoy the fruits of your labour before the hoards descend!
As I’m reading that essay, all I’m thinking is ‘what a load of bollocks’..
Then this bit …”By making small changes now – in our relationships, habits, and cultural stories – we alter what becomes possible.”
… Haven’t so many indigenous people around the world been doing this forever, when living (nearly) sustainably within their environment, yet they have been seduced or outcompeted by modernity everywhere??
Why do the same thing that hasn’t worked and expect a different result??
What Nate is suggesting is the same time honoured path to a new religion type grouping, possibly more ‘animistic’ or perhaps ‘natureistic’.
I continually see Nate as a person that is looking for answers where there are none, stuck in denial of our situation that he understands better than most.
Define excursion.
Let’s make an Excursion to the Strait of Hormuz,
It’ll be fun, an outing, a short cruise!
We booked a roundtrip,
despite risk of sinking ship,
Alas, blocked at both ends, all our fare we lose!
Sorry, I have definitely caught the limerick bug after being exposed all last week to the contagion. Maybe that will be the new pandemic?
🤣 🤣 🤣
Yes a pandemic of limericks, where we can only speak in rhymes!
A bit like that Buffy the Vampire episode when they can only speak in song
Sounds like they’re gonna have to reset and wait for a better virus.
P.S. I know nothing yet about hantavirus so am not vouching this is true, but No1 has a good track record.
https://no01.substack.com/p/the-wrong-virus
Oh, if this were a movie plot, there’s still a lot of scope for the story to build with the dramatic twists and turns we are fed to believe (and seem to love, at least when it comes to Hollywood). For example, the Australian passengers on the fated ship will be repatriated to a quarantine facility in the same state with the current biblical mouse plague. There they will be monitored for 3 weeks under the strictest supervision but who knows, one could escape by dead of night, run across the wheat fields with the streaming flood of rodents, introducing the contagion to its destined hosts which will then produce a mutation during their plague cycle to re-infect the entire population of Australia once we tuck into our breakfast cereals which in time will be completely contaminated by mouse droppings.
Golly, I got so carried away there that I reverted back to my run-on sentence days.
Gee, who knew that writing scripts for Hollywood could be so much fun and if it’s good enough, even be possibly played out in real life?
By the way, that first part about the Aussie passengers going to a facility in Western Australia is factual. And the last bit about possibly reconsidering if you really want to eat Australian grown wheat in a seasons’ time is also true, at least in my thinking.
hilarious and not totally outside the scope of possibility
Matt Orfalea does good work, just in case you still care about the covid crimes.
There are no consequences for unforgiveable behavior, regardless how clear the evidence is.
It’s so depressing.
New Study: 95% Decline in Wildlife in Latin America & Caribbean since 1970
View at Medium.com
Just imagine how much biodiversity loss will occur on the downslope of the Carbon pulse, or if/when CACTUS occcurs.
Whew! I’m exhausted. Bravo Hideaway. Last time I saw doomer porn that good was Sofia Pineda Ochoa’s documentary Greenwashed. If we could convert this essay into a video presentation, it would blow the roof off!!
Took me a couple hours to get through it because I had to google about a thousand words. Gonna give it another go tonight or tomorrow.
I liked this bit a lot:
When I found un-Denial (Jan 2024) I was already a full believer in fast collapse. It was mostly just intuition (and hope😂). Eventually Hideaway’s content confirmed the intuition for me.
After reading this essay I went searching in the older comments because I was curious to see if Hideaway was a supernova believer when he got here. Yep, he was.
First time Hideaway talks about fast collapse (1/2/24)
https://un-denial.com/2023/12/25/by-mike-roberts-humans-are-a-species/comment-page-1/#comment-92875
If you’re curious, this was his very first comment (12/8/23)
https://un-denial.com/2023/12/05/dr-tom-murphys-infinite-growth-with-a-finite-brain/comment-page-1/#comment-92474
Hideaway and I began contributing to this site about a month apart. Rob & un-Denial inherited not one but two heavy hitting geniuses at about the same time. And the rest is history.😂😂😂
Took me a long time too. I needed a way to get the scaling terms to stick and googled it and found a brief review of West’s book and i referred back to it when I got confused. Given even Hideaway got the terms mixed up with Complexity versus Entropy, we can be forgiven, this is some high level stuff!
The bit about the locusts was fascinating. There is a detailed write up about locusts in Nth America in Lyle Lewis’s book, it’s too long to include here, but I will send it to you, they were an incredible force of nature and he described the way they shaped the landscape, similar to bison and passenger pigeons and then detailed the extinction of the Rocky Mountain locust and what effect that had.
Now will check out the first comment links by you two geniuses 🤣
THC popped up after 20 years of silence.
Steve St. Angelo wonders if this guy is The Hills Group. I was wondering the same thing. Us old timers remember the Hills Group for a controversial peak oil paper back in the good old days.
Google says the paper is no longer available on the web but I of course have an offline copy in my library.
Click to access The-Hills-Group-Depletion_-A-Determination-for-the-Worlds-Petroleum-Reserve-1-Mar-2015.pdf
https://peakoilbarrel.com/us-february-oil-production-rebounds-2/#comment-796171
someone should tell him to get over to un-denial stat!
Also good idea to save copies Rob. I have started doing that too. Lots of things actually are not forever on the internet
Joe Clarkson seems to agree with Hideaway’s conclusion.
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2026/05/05/323-they-first-make-mad/comment-page-1/#comment-51746
Before finding un-denial I recall comments from JoeC (prob on DPollard’s blog) saying anyone continuing to live in a city is mad, so of course his name and comments stuck in my mind 😩
Hydrogen and magnets!
I can’t tell if this is sly wit or spam. Care to elaborate?
Wow, Uncle. I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore. Thank you as always for bringing us back down to reality, you are the messenger we would take a bullet for. I have only just skimmed the very surface but it will need to be digested over a few days, way too heavy for bedtime reading!
I checked back tonight to post one of the most serious podcasts I’ve come across regarding the precarious state of the Russian/Ukranian/European conflict. So it’s definitely a case of fun and games aside. But, it was jolly good fun while it lasted!
Thank you to everyone who took a punt on my last podcast recommendation, and I think this one is a must listen to remind ourselves just how close we still are to a nuclear situation. Russia looks like it’s at the end of the redlines and this distinguished gentleman, whose accent only makes his pronouncements even more sobering and chilling, makes the case that a nuclear intervention should be pursued to decapitate the European elites and thus bring the war to its inevitable conclusion. He claims that a limited nuclear exchange where the power elites suffer the worst (including targeting of their assets and bunkers) could be a saviour strategy for the world as it would aim to destroy their appetite for further destabilising war. More and more this view is becoming the vocal majority in his influential circles, it is not only a matter of political doctrine but aligns their deep philosophy to emasculate Europe once and for all. Reading between the lines, I can see that Russia wanting to continue the Iran war at least on a simmer if not full-boil level dovetails nicely with hastening the downfall of Europe, which is pretty much a has-been entity in their view (and also the US view).
Prof Karaganov says we will be in war for the next 20 years. Prof Hideaway knows something he doesn’t and Cactus will get us first. Either way, who needs to worry too much about Hormuz when it’s Dire Straits for us all?
Namaste, friends.
Thanks Gaia, I listened to this yesterday and agree it was sobering.
Another related new point came out yesterday from Alexander Mercouris discussing a recent speech by Putin. Apparently, when the leaders of Europe provoked Russia into a costly war 4 years ago and then sanctioned Russia in response, they were certain that Russia would quickly collapse. They made plans for carving up the spoils from a collapsed Russia. This explains why out of the blue the Sweden and Finland decided to join NATO despite zero threat. They were worried they wouldn’t be able to feast on Russia’s carcass if they were outside NATO.
It’s all about securing non-renewable resources needed to sustain modernity, although Mercouris, Diesen, and colleagues do not understand overshoot or depletion.
Nor do our leaders understand that global cooperation is required to delay CACTUS and extend resource extraction and modernity as long as possible.
This was an intimidating read at first! but I got to the end of it and it all makes sense and I am going to have a listen to Prf West with Nate as well. i struggle a bit with the graphs locking in, but the written descriptions are very clear and this idea of scaling and how it translates from biological systems to social ones is fascinating and so clearly demonstrated, I can see why this lightening bolt moment went off and how it underpins the cactus idea. I had heard you mention his work a few times, but this really pads it out well.
Even though there are parts of collapse that are happening already, and we have declining population and energy use/availability, the social and technological complexity is still increasing, to continue to give the efficiency gains, but now even that is threatened by events of past couple of months.
I have a good example from over the weekend. Chatting with my brother in law who is a sparky (aussie slang for an electrician) and his most recent job involved the company he works with setting up what is known as a Robo Dairy. He described a kilometer long shed, half km wide, with massive fans around the edge, and no fence, and the cows all stay underneath the roof of this massive shed and are milked by robots at whatever time of the day they ‘prefer’. He said he could not believe it at first, but then saw it when he came back a week or so later, and the cows had learnt the new system and moved into place for milking as needed, with no human involvement whatsoever. Apparently this set up has resulted in a 40% increase in milk production. And to top it all off, the paddocks where they used to graze around the massive shed, has now got solar panel arrays as well as fodder grown there for the cows, and somehow their effulent is dealt with as well. It all sounds rather unbelievable but it’s true. I guess if robots have been assembling cars for a long while, why not milk cows.
The other interesting thing he said for his work, is the cost of repairs or replacement for refrigeration to the milk vats has gone up massively, for example a repair that costed 500 on average, is now 5k! As the particular mix or type of gas for the cooling is not readily available, as well as pvc pipe and copper wiring in short supply. I said to him that these types of disruptions will be happening to all business across the area (this is the Goulburn Valley, major food bowl area of Vic) and he agreed and says he sees it. But of course denial and optimism bias still kicks in and no one is that worried yet.
Had a chuckle Hideaway, with your example of the increase in the number of people working for the local govt in country area and red tape. Both my folks have always said what a complete rort the local govt employees are and they get paid huge amounts of money for doing nothing.
There was something else I wanted to add about the locusts, but will revist that tomorrow.
Almost a snap, Renaee! You and I posted almost at the same time, and on quite different topics but equally thought-provoking! Hope you had a lovely family weekend. Will try to work out a time for a chat later this week, Mondays are always frenetic with new business arising to take care of, I’m sure you know what I mean.
Thank you for that vivid description of the latest version of the milking industry. Where once we had dewy-eyed milkmaids on three-legged stools (at least from the stories I read as a child because this bucolic vision had already long disappeared) now we have million dollar robotics to massage the poor cows’ teats. I think Uncle Hideaway would have a conniption fit trying to work out EROEI on this system, and the most unbalanced equation of all would probably be the caloric discrepancy between the milk generated (and after it finally reaches the end user, including all refrigeration needed) and all the energy inputs from go to woe.
One tiny thing going wrong and the whole operation could come to a standstill and then what is the back-up system for milking the cows? Sigh. We monkeys really have gotten too clever for our own britches (that’s an American saying, much like too big for your boots)
However, you should still be glowing with the pride of winning the limerick comp, well deserved!
A very good evening to you and your family and see you on this page probably tomorrow!
Milking cows by hand is seriously hard work. I spent a couple memorable summers as a child on a small farm where I helped my aunt with forearms like Popeye milk every morning and night. We also had a hand crank cream separator which also was a lot of work to operate.
As you guessed,did not see your reply til the morning, after reading that essay I prompty shut the computer down and we finished watching that great movie Chris referenced a couple of days ago, feel good film despite the overall theme or maybe because of it.
Re the level of complexity built into this operation, yes it is astounding to think how many points of failure there would be! Let alone the poor EROEI as you noted. It illustrates well the need for growing tech as pop. grows, as per this point
Even though in this instance it’s the milk that is being extracted, not ores or oil.
Growing up we would drive down the dirt road to our local dairy and help ourselves to a 6 litre container direct from the milk vat and leave some coins in a jar in the dairy. The old decrepit dairy still stands on the same property.
I had listened to a bit of that same interview with GlennD you posted on, and found his accent tricky so only got 10 mins in, and now knowing what you have summarised i dont think i need to hear more, it’s so surreal, i think for peace of mind will skip that one.
Yes let’s connect later in the week, friday’s always good for me 🙂
A wildfire leaves behind a high -entropy state, not a low-entropy state.
A wildfire always leaves behind a much lower entropy state than before the fire. All the heat dissipated by the fire is taking the environment from a higher energy state to a lower energy state.
The dissipative heat from the fire had to come from a higher entropy state lowering the entropy of the system. If it was the reverse from a low entropy state to a high entropy state, it takes energy to do this, not give off energy.
Over time the low entropy state of ash, combined with water and life builds up to a higher entropy state with an increase in complexity as a new ecosystem develops turning around 1% of incoming energy from sunlight into the complex system, turning low grade light into glucose feeding the plants. The other 99% of incoming energy is also given off as waste heat.
Oh boy I thought you understood the second law of thermodynamics, Hideaway.
Google your precious A.I. to find out if a fire leaves behind a lower or higher state of entropy. The leaves that are being burnt have a high-energy, low entropy state. That lower entropy state is reached by utilising the energy from the sun via photosynthesis to form the carbohydrates within the plant. Creating order,if you like, or decreasing entropy locally (on earth ). That decrease in entropy on earth
would not happen without the increase in entropy caused by the nuclear reactions in the sun. (The entropy of that closed sun-earth system increases, despite the local (on earth ) decrease in entropy.) When those carbohydrates are burnt, the order, or low -entropy state that they have, changes to a less-ordered, or higher-entropy state, releasing energy (that was originally obtained from the sun to form the chemical bonds within those carbohydrates )
Burn all the trees in that forest, and you’re releasing energy, and increasing entropy. When we die, the decomposition process (which is microbial life obtaining energy for their metabolism by breaking the chemical bonds of the various organic compounds within us) is releasing energy and increasing entropy
too. The chemical compounds in either case are being oxidised, whether by respiration or burning, and changing from a low-entropy, ordered state to higher-entropy, more disordered state.
I haven’t bothered even learning how to use AI. An enormous waste of energy and water.
It’s all about defining the boundary of the system in question, and identifying all the flows across said boundary. Can get tricky.
“The chemical compounds in either case are being oxidised, whether by respiration or burning, and changing from a low-entropy, ordered state to higher-entropy, more disordered state.”
Apologies David, I have indeed got it the wrong way around calling low entropy high entropy and vice versa.
I’m thinking high complexity and low complexity and calling entropy the same, when it’s the opposite. High growing complexity = low entropy, low falling complexity = high entropy.
Rob, in the wildfire part in the article can you change the low-entropy state to high-entropy state please.
I’m only human and make mistakes like everyone else.
Thanks for the correction David.
Done.
I get the sign wrong on entropy all the time, as the fact that I missed the error as editor proves.
For me, the idea of order versus disorder is clear, it’s the word we label the idea with that I frequently mix up.
P.S. You got the sign correct two other times in the essay when discussing algae blooms and chemical explosions.
All the best, Hideaway, and thanks for the essay.
Ooof. Head is spinning too much already. But I really do appreciate the physics revision lesson. I am thinking that a limited nuclear strike would also leave a lower entropy state after the catastrophic firestorm. Unfortunately, this would be more or less permanent in that area as a new ecosystem would not be able to develop for eons. We really have opened up Pandora’s box with the advent of the nuclear possibility. And now every country will want the bomb. Clowns to the left and jokers to the right, stuck in the middle of Hormuz, what could possibly go wrong?