In Part I of our year end review, Yours Truly & Sir Kenaz were joined by the Eminent Sir Cleveland and the Lovely Sir Uncouth to brainstorm all the coming DOOM of 2025. We analyze 2024, looking back at what we missed and what we got right… and then Look into the Future. Enjoy, Dear Listeners! 😉 😘
Great show! A few thoughts or questions for you et al:
At about the 2 hr mark or maybe slightly after, one of you mentioned that gdp tracks oil consumption almost exactly. I wonder what that really means though. In the US for example, rent-seeking and usury make up a huge part of the gdp calculations. I am curious about any outliers in that study. Is there any country that is less financialized which deviates from this a bit? Could we get way more bang for our buck if we changed that, or, perhaps another way to put it is is there another way to out it is, if you compared GDPs with usury and rent-seeking/ponzi-like activities taken out, would the gdp vs oil consumption still look the same? What about comparing ppp with oil consumption? I have 4 kids 4 and under, a demanding job, and no reach so I probably wont try to figure this out anytime soon, but I wonder if there is some lessons to take away from that which are useful.
You mentioned the need for taiwanese chips and how china is also dependent on them. They are, but they’ve managed to make their own 3nm chips but probably with way lower efficiency. Presumably they’ll catch up pretty soon. Upstream in supply chain on that depends heavily on the dutch as well though, fwiw. Idk how the chinese are doing on replacing that.
The country could manage without immigrants and with a falling population for quite some time, especially since we have so much more mechanization/automation/etc. The difference would be though that a bunch of frivolous jobs would have to disappear in order to reallocate that labor, and it would mean overturning the applecart quite a bit. I dont see trump or the next congress allowing that any more than you do though. The country ran fine with 100 million people after all, and women werent even in the general labor force then. We should have the labor to do what we need. This seems like a merely academic discussion though, at least in the short and medium term, for all the reasons you can surely imagine.
The relationship is 0.98 for R^2, which is basically 'near perfect.'
Even nonsense service sector bunk & silliness... ultimately relies on Transport.
The reason why the 0.98 persists (even when you use PPP and other things) is because without Oil, Logistics is impossible. Nate Hagens put it as follows:
There are 8 billion people alive today. The Oil we dig out, coupled with Biofuels & other stuff which plays the role of Oil in our day to day lives...
Those things provide an additional 5 trillion Human Bodies worth of Manual labour.
When you drive your car or get on a bus, imagine that 'legions of men' are pulling you forward. Without that additional 5 trillion bodies worth of Muscle Power...
Most technological 'solutions' fall apart. Remember: If you're a mad scientist in Antarctica with 'a SOLUTION to humanity's energy problems'... it doesn't mean anything if you cannot move from point A to B, and it matters even less if your 'wundertech' cannot move from point A to B thanks to the additional 5 trillion bodies.
tl;dr - The modern world is embedded into the usage of Coal, Oil & Gas. Stagnation, Plateaus, Declines & Falls in these things... mean billions of casualties from War, Famine, Disease, etc. That is basically 'baked in the cake' given how we live today.
You notice if you look at history ... all the plans of mice and men fall apart as soon as transport becomes more expensive than the worth of the goods/people you are transporting. Even importing slaves into the city on trains for their slave labor turns inefficient when the price of keeping the trains running become excessive contrasted with the money saved by using slave labor. Maybe if you went back to horses pulling slave carts but that tech is by and large lost.
Being unable to move from A to B on abundant resources (we really do have so much coal, oil and gas you would not believe it) is a fundamental sign that a civilization is really collapsing at a fundamental level. It's not just Turkish Mongolians. It's an entire population dumb enough to slurp their lies when any creature with a survival instinct would know that these are terrible ideas. Like for example, putting women into the work force and having children raised by daycare centers.
I’ve pondered this a while and while I think everything you and the others have said is pretty on point, I cant shale the feeling that human ingenuity will kick this can a bit down the road into a more effective future dystopia. For example, I work for a company that doesnt manufacture much, we do other stuff mostly unrelated to manyfacturing, however, when covid came we had a meeting to figure out how we might build ventilators and how many we could probably build per day. Theyd have to be manually controlled rather than electronically, and we werent sure, but we figured we could probably make several functional ones in the first week, and then churn them out quite a bit faster after that. Then it turned out ventilators werent that great and the whole thing was a cluster and the pandemic wasnt that bad, but we couldve done it. Now, it isnt like most companies could do that sort of thing, but whenever I’ve been in serious situations before, be they natural disasters or serious problems at sea or away from civilization, people are pretty resourceful. Except the absolutely useless ones, which are represented in every cohort and across all intelligence levels. I’ve seen literally retarded people bust their ass trying to solve problems, and certifiable geniuses who were better at physics than me be unable to problem solve basic real life situations. I think if things break hard enough we might have a chance, but if they dont we’re in for some book of revelation level dystopia.
We will be lucky if we get a better dystopia if we continue to play into the great false narrative. Very lucky because it isn't working. Only one group is getting spoils from that system but everybody else loses when they invest in it. Most importantly of all ... spoils systems themselves are not civilization and never will be.
I'm jumping in with a late response due to work and not being able to get to it before now - my apologies.
It really just depends. I don't have much faith in most people's abilities to be able to be as 'nimble' as they think they can be when world views shift. Most of them simply don't have the ability to think about other people's views, which is necessary for how the world will likely change when things get scarce.
Take, for instance, this H1B thing. I've been trying to bang this drum for a decade. Yet, until the immigration beast comes for the White Collar jobs, they really don't care how much it screws the Blue Collar. They don't care how much it messes up the culture, the healthcare system, the cost of goods, etc. They simply enjoy that they can get grown men to work for child slave prices.
And, they may stop caring as soon as it suits them. It is what it is.
The issue is that the areas where the immigrants congregate in jobs, and where that last bit of oil is used matter. If we're told we have to ration oil, it's going to hurt. If we're told that Food prices go up and availability down due to labor and oil, it's going to hurt most people. Maybe not me, because I build systems in depth, I might actually be stronger for it, I'm not sure. But not most.
It also depends on how the Gov goes about it. If they do token raids on immigrants, no big deal. If they actually use military assets and go big/strong, it's a cluster f- waiting to happen.
But, if they don't, the populist tiger they rode into power on is a giant beast waiting to release a whole lot of energy, as I've talked about as well.
No matter what year it is or where it is or what society it is ... if you show me a bunch of people saying "I'm gonna to what I need to do to get the cheapest wages and I don't care who it hurts, I'm just gonna do what I can get away with and everybody else can worry about how that impacts the greater civilization. I'm hiring slaves from some country where they will be grateful just to be eating and our society be damned," then you are talking about somebody who is a nation wrecker who has gotten access to the interior and the higher trust circle.
No man is an island and that applies to everybody across the spectrum, including a misanthrope like me.
Before we deport anybody, first order of business is deporting Elon Musk. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Send him back to South Africa. Fake and gay bastard has yet to do anything but talk trash and fail at everything. The Tesla is a joke meanwhile "Tony Stark" is promising to escape to Mars. The guy is a billion dollar tax subsidy flake and should be hogtied and thrown onto a garbage barge outbound.
Costs us more than he's worth. Tired of someone posing as a right leaning individual; when he's a liberal sucking off the government teat while enslaving children all over the world.
Elon Musk is a self-made individual. His success is owed to his own boot-strapping and innovativeness.
... well, I mean that and one billion dollars of subsidy from American taxpayers. Objectively, has not done sh*t in his entire life, including at his fake Paypal makework job.
I just saw a bunch of Teslas being hauled off for scrap. Only 22 years it took for Elon to fail misterably. What a charlatan. Imagine all the real entrepreneurs suppressed during this 22 year period while this guy did his song-n-dance. Probably millions.
P.S. His bulletproof super transporter was so flimsy people were punching their finger through the chassis. Silver coated cardboard. The epitome of what we mean when we say "fake and gay."
China is able to build much better chips nowadays; they have the means, materials and human capital to do that (& much more) till at least mid-century... after which Demographic issues begin to take their toll on them.
I expect them to do so, just because they have the surpluses for Materials, Energy, Demography, etc to do quite a bit. But again, this is temporary. China will not grow forever, and neither will any other people or society.
Countries that 'manage' do so with Service Sector Jobs (mostly bunk nowadays) and currency manipulation. Japan (the best example) did so via the Dollar trade, but even that is now falling apart due to how rapidly they are contracting.
Here's the problem: If Japan contracts to 74 million people by 2100, it will not be the same 74 million circa 1945-1950 with a median age in the late 20s. Rather, it will be a 74 million people with a Median age well over the 50s.
Populations have a quantity aspect, as well as a quality aspect. Median Age determines the latter. The reason why population contraction is disastrous (once it surpasses 1-2% per annum) is due to said fact. Countries in Europe that contract... will be filled with old people who cannot work in heavy industry, intensive agriculture, etc.
So tl;dr- 'The Country running well with 100 million again' is not the case... because It won't be the same 100 million people as decades prior.
It's still surplus from the jobs that are productive that led to the luxury. Funny thing is when we doubled up by putting women into the workforce, we technically saw a halving in individual productivity from men ceasing to really produce with gusto. Becoming a bitch has very serious consequences with 1/7th testosterone on tap.
Have to agree with Ahnaf. There was never the slack in the system that comes with scarcity planning. It was always ample harvest planning. That is not going to work now the way it did previously.
It's all theoretical discussion now because when that current slack start to tighten up, people are going to discover that people lost the ability to prepare and plan for scarcity which is a natural requirement of any growth based system. And that is the last definition of any culture which is cannibal culture.
Civil Defense is the opposite of cannibal culture and America has no civil defense plan whatsoever to absorb slowdowns, unexpected shocks and outright breakdowns in supply.
In Part I of our year end review, Yours Truly & Sir Kenaz were joined by the Eminent Sir Cleveland and the Lovely Sir Uncouth to brainstorm all the coming DOOM of 2025. We analyze 2024, looking back at what we missed and what we got right… and then Look into the Future. Enjoy, Dear Listeners! 😉 😘
Well one great thing about ‘24 is that it’s nearly over.
Great show! A few thoughts or questions for you et al:
At about the 2 hr mark or maybe slightly after, one of you mentioned that gdp tracks oil consumption almost exactly. I wonder what that really means though. In the US for example, rent-seeking and usury make up a huge part of the gdp calculations. I am curious about any outliers in that study. Is there any country that is less financialized which deviates from this a bit? Could we get way more bang for our buck if we changed that, or, perhaps another way to put it is is there another way to out it is, if you compared GDPs with usury and rent-seeking/ponzi-like activities taken out, would the gdp vs oil consumption still look the same? What about comparing ppp with oil consumption? I have 4 kids 4 and under, a demanding job, and no reach so I probably wont try to figure this out anytime soon, but I wonder if there is some lessons to take away from that which are useful.
You mentioned the need for taiwanese chips and how china is also dependent on them. They are, but they’ve managed to make their own 3nm chips but probably with way lower efficiency. Presumably they’ll catch up pretty soon. Upstream in supply chain on that depends heavily on the dutch as well though, fwiw. Idk how the chinese are doing on replacing that.
The country could manage without immigrants and with a falling population for quite some time, especially since we have so much more mechanization/automation/etc. The difference would be though that a bunch of frivolous jobs would have to disappear in order to reallocate that labor, and it would mean overturning the applecart quite a bit. I dont see trump or the next congress allowing that any more than you do though. The country ran fine with 100 million people after all, and women werent even in the general labor force then. We should have the labor to do what we need. This seems like a merely academic discussion though, at least in the short and medium term, for all the reasons you can surely imagine.
[3/3]
The relationship is 0.98 for R^2, which is basically 'near perfect.'
Even nonsense service sector bunk & silliness... ultimately relies on Transport.
The reason why the 0.98 persists (even when you use PPP and other things) is because without Oil, Logistics is impossible. Nate Hagens put it as follows:
There are 8 billion people alive today. The Oil we dig out, coupled with Biofuels & other stuff which plays the role of Oil in our day to day lives...
Those things provide an additional 5 trillion Human Bodies worth of Manual labour.
When you drive your car or get on a bus, imagine that 'legions of men' are pulling you forward. Without that additional 5 trillion bodies worth of Muscle Power...
Most technological 'solutions' fall apart. Remember: If you're a mad scientist in Antarctica with 'a SOLUTION to humanity's energy problems'... it doesn't mean anything if you cannot move from point A to B, and it matters even less if your 'wundertech' cannot move from point A to B thanks to the additional 5 trillion bodies.
tl;dr - The modern world is embedded into the usage of Coal, Oil & Gas. Stagnation, Plateaus, Declines & Falls in these things... mean billions of casualties from War, Famine, Disease, etc. That is basically 'baked in the cake' given how we live today.
You notice if you look at history ... all the plans of mice and men fall apart as soon as transport becomes more expensive than the worth of the goods/people you are transporting. Even importing slaves into the city on trains for their slave labor turns inefficient when the price of keeping the trains running become excessive contrasted with the money saved by using slave labor. Maybe if you went back to horses pulling slave carts but that tech is by and large lost.
Being unable to move from A to B on abundant resources (we really do have so much coal, oil and gas you would not believe it) is a fundamental sign that a civilization is really collapsing at a fundamental level. It's not just Turkish Mongolians. It's an entire population dumb enough to slurp their lies when any creature with a survival instinct would know that these are terrible ideas. Like for example, putting women into the work force and having children raised by daycare centers.
I’ve pondered this a while and while I think everything you and the others have said is pretty on point, I cant shale the feeling that human ingenuity will kick this can a bit down the road into a more effective future dystopia. For example, I work for a company that doesnt manufacture much, we do other stuff mostly unrelated to manyfacturing, however, when covid came we had a meeting to figure out how we might build ventilators and how many we could probably build per day. Theyd have to be manually controlled rather than electronically, and we werent sure, but we figured we could probably make several functional ones in the first week, and then churn them out quite a bit faster after that. Then it turned out ventilators werent that great and the whole thing was a cluster and the pandemic wasnt that bad, but we couldve done it. Now, it isnt like most companies could do that sort of thing, but whenever I’ve been in serious situations before, be they natural disasters or serious problems at sea or away from civilization, people are pretty resourceful. Except the absolutely useless ones, which are represented in every cohort and across all intelligence levels. I’ve seen literally retarded people bust their ass trying to solve problems, and certifiable geniuses who were better at physics than me be unable to problem solve basic real life situations. I think if things break hard enough we might have a chance, but if they dont we’re in for some book of revelation level dystopia.
I agree with what you just described.
We will be lucky if we get a better dystopia if we continue to play into the great false narrative. Very lucky because it isn't working. Only one group is getting spoils from that system but everybody else loses when they invest in it. Most importantly of all ... spoils systems themselves are not civilization and never will be.
This is all great, thanks!
I'm jumping in with a late response due to work and not being able to get to it before now - my apologies.
It really just depends. I don't have much faith in most people's abilities to be able to be as 'nimble' as they think they can be when world views shift. Most of them simply don't have the ability to think about other people's views, which is necessary for how the world will likely change when things get scarce.
Take, for instance, this H1B thing. I've been trying to bang this drum for a decade. Yet, until the immigration beast comes for the White Collar jobs, they really don't care how much it screws the Blue Collar. They don't care how much it messes up the culture, the healthcare system, the cost of goods, etc. They simply enjoy that they can get grown men to work for child slave prices.
And, they may stop caring as soon as it suits them. It is what it is.
The issue is that the areas where the immigrants congregate in jobs, and where that last bit of oil is used matter. If we're told we have to ration oil, it's going to hurt. If we're told that Food prices go up and availability down due to labor and oil, it's going to hurt most people. Maybe not me, because I build systems in depth, I might actually be stronger for it, I'm not sure. But not most.
It also depends on how the Gov goes about it. If they do token raids on immigrants, no big deal. If they actually use military assets and go big/strong, it's a cluster f- waiting to happen.
But, if they don't, the populist tiger they rode into power on is a giant beast waiting to release a whole lot of energy, as I've talked about as well.
So, it's hard to tell at this time.
No matter what year it is or where it is or what society it is ... if you show me a bunch of people saying "I'm gonna to what I need to do to get the cheapest wages and I don't care who it hurts, I'm just gonna do what I can get away with and everybody else can worry about how that impacts the greater civilization. I'm hiring slaves from some country where they will be grateful just to be eating and our society be damned," then you are talking about somebody who is a nation wrecker who has gotten access to the interior and the higher trust circle.
No man is an island and that applies to everybody across the spectrum, including a misanthrope like me.
Before we deport anybody, first order of business is deporting Elon Musk. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Send him back to South Africa. Fake and gay bastard has yet to do anything but talk trash and fail at everything. The Tesla is a joke meanwhile "Tony Stark" is promising to escape to Mars. The guy is a billion dollar tax subsidy flake and should be hogtied and thrown onto a garbage barge outbound.
100%
Costs us more than he's worth. Tired of someone posing as a right leaning individual; when he's a liberal sucking off the government teat while enslaving children all over the world.
Pirates get hung.
The rest of us work.
Elon Musk is a self-made individual. His success is owed to his own boot-strapping and innovativeness.
... well, I mean that and one billion dollars of subsidy from American taxpayers. Objectively, has not done sh*t in his entire life, including at his fake Paypal makework job.
I just saw a bunch of Teslas being hauled off for scrap. Only 22 years it took for Elon to fail misterably. What a charlatan. Imagine all the real entrepreneurs suppressed during this 22 year period while this guy did his song-n-dance. Probably millions.
P.S. His bulletproof super transporter was so flimsy people were punching their finger through the chassis. Silver coated cardboard. The epitome of what we mean when we say "fake and gay."
[2/3]
China is able to build much better chips nowadays; they have the means, materials and human capital to do that (& much more) till at least mid-century... after which Demographic issues begin to take their toll on them.
I expect them to do so, just because they have the surpluses for Materials, Energy, Demography, etc to do quite a bit. But again, this is temporary. China will not grow forever, and neither will any other people or society.
[1/3]
I'll start with the bottom first:
Countries that 'manage' do so with Service Sector Jobs (mostly bunk nowadays) and currency manipulation. Japan (the best example) did so via the Dollar trade, but even that is now falling apart due to how rapidly they are contracting.
Here's the problem: If Japan contracts to 74 million people by 2100, it will not be the same 74 million circa 1945-1950 with a median age in the late 20s. Rather, it will be a 74 million people with a Median age well over the 50s.
Populations have a quantity aspect, as well as a quality aspect. Median Age determines the latter. The reason why population contraction is disastrous (once it surpasses 1-2% per annum) is due to said fact. Countries in Europe that contract... will be filled with old people who cannot work in heavy industry, intensive agriculture, etc.
So tl;dr- 'The Country running well with 100 million again' is not the case... because It won't be the same 100 million people as decades prior.
It's still surplus from the jobs that are productive that led to the luxury. Funny thing is when we doubled up by putting women into the workforce, we technically saw a halving in individual productivity from men ceasing to really produce with gusto. Becoming a bitch has very serious consequences with 1/7th testosterone on tap.
Have to agree with Ahnaf. There was never the slack in the system that comes with scarcity planning. It was always ample harvest planning. That is not going to work now the way it did previously.
It's all theoretical discussion now because when that current slack start to tighten up, people are going to discover that people lost the ability to prepare and plan for scarcity which is a natural requirement of any growth based system. And that is the last definition of any culture which is cannibal culture.
Civil Defense is the opposite of cannibal culture and America has no civil defense plan whatsoever to absorb slowdowns, unexpected shocks and outright breakdowns in supply.