Debt Rattle April 20 2018

 

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  • #40150

    Daniel Garber The quarry 1917   • The World’s First Total Bubble (MB) • Now Even a Fed Dove Homes in on the “Everything Bubble” (WS) • Recession
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle April 20 2018]

    #40151
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    Since we can’t seem to behave ourselves; perhaps our extinction would solve most (make that all) of earth’s problems.
    I wonder if humanoids are an integral species on other planets with a rich diversity of life?
    A rhetorical question; but this one wonders…

    #40152
    Dr. D
    Participant

    They blame humans for the extinction at a time when there was a planetary climactic upheaval and the Ice Age ended. …But it just had to be the humans.

    Thought experiment: if the humans killed the mastdons, sloths, and glyptodons, where a few sparse hunter-gatherers who barely occupied the landscape tracked down and extinguished every individual in every nook and cranny, every trackless forest and mountaintop, then what? Stopped? They killed massive, hard-to-kill, hard-to-eat mastadons by the hundred million but somehow couldn’t kill the bison or the elk? They killed the giant beaver but not the modern beaver? The giant sloth but not the regular sloth? Yeah, right. And when colonists got here the whole continent was teeming with life, in great variety, specifically gardened and engineered — by the same murderous humans — to be lush, diverse, and abundant. In specific methods, customs, that insured in the strongest possible terms, the eternal survival of each and every one of those creatures…and not for nothing, but violently protect them so they could eat and use them tomorrow. Yes, these exact same humans they say killed every large species on earth, that by their own evidence, weren’t populous or strong enough to clear the state of Ohio.

    When are they going to stop reporting this codswallop? I’m not adding anything, their own gol-durned sentences refute them. But anything, ANYTHING! to make sure humans are bad, evil, and the enemy that must be destroyed, when two second’s thought by some dummy from podunkville can tell you it’s nonsense. A-Y-I.

    Kind of makes you wonder who “they” are. If they actually felt this way, makes you wonder why they don’t do something about it, like live on a reservation as a traditionalist. Why? Because they themselves don’t believe it either. Not in their hearts, where it matters. Only in their minds, where their money and careers are.

    #40153
    VisionHawk
    Participant
    #40154
    anticlimactic
    Participant

    TESLA

    Two business partners were talking. One complained that they lost money on everything they sold. His partner said ‘Don’t worry, we’ll make it up on turnover.’

    This is supposed to be a joke. For Tesla it seems to be a business plan!

    Perhaps Tesla should register as a charity as it seems to be totally dependent on donations to keep it going.

    When I read about Tesla I keep thinking ‘DeLorean’!

    #40155
    Dr. D
    Participant

    Yeild curve narrowing to flip, dollar market tightening, and Europe seems to be bracing, particularly with DeutcheBank. But when you’ve got avalanche conditions, any snowflake will do.

    #40156
    seychelles
    Participant

    ” Indeed, for capital to globalise fully, the regimes that pledged allegiance to the manifesto had first to be torn asunder. Has history ever procured a more delicious irony?”

    #40157
    Phyllostachys
    Participant

    @Dr. D
    I wish I could remember the source of this information, but there is actually a compelling body of evidence in the fossil record of migrations of early human populations into new regions or islands coinciding with the extinction of large fauna within those habitats. The disparity between extinction of large animals and survival of smaller ones can easily be explained by the lower birth rates and population densities of larger animals. The bison could reproduce quickly enough to stave off extinction, while the mastodon could not. No doubt the end of the last Ice Age did nothing to help these animals, but it is perfectly conceivable that without human predation they could have survived in colder northern latitudes. Furthermore, the disparity between perception of early humans as “murderous” hunters vs. cultivators of a “lush, diverse, and abundant” continent can also be resolved with an explanation that should be easily recognizable to readers of this blog. Whenever humans (or any other species for that matter) learn to exploit a new resource, whether it be big game or oil deposits, they always consume it as rapidly as possible, and only once it is gone are they forced to learn the necessity of conservation and regeneration of remaining resources. Thus could the same bands of humans who hunted the mastodon to extinction 10,000 years ago have over time become the forest gardeners that European migrants drove to near extinction with their own predations.
    Incidentally, I don’t believe that humans are bad, evil, or must be destroyed. Just that our technological capacity for destruction has unfortunately developed much more quickly than our moral capacity for preserving and enriching the world in which we live. I greatly respect your contributions to this blog and hope that my own perspective has been elucidating.

    #40158
    Chris M
    Participant

    There’s a lot to unpack in the article about sorghum and China.

    China’s agriculture isn’t as industrialized as that in the United States. For some reason, the farmers in China were left behind versus the manufacturing industry.

    You also have to ask how much of China’s own agricultural production is for people food, instead of animal feed.

    Also, maybe China figured out that it is more economical to buy cheap US sorghum than to grow it themselves. That’s an indictment of our system whereby the commodity casino determines how much farmers are paid for their labor.

    There’s a true cost to food. Pay now, or pay later.

    God will not be mocked.

    #40159
    aviehmayer
    Participant

    And what Varoufakis did to help Greece? Was he able to give them a way out?

    #40160

    Varoufakis did that, yes.

    #40169
    Dr. D
    Participant

    Well said, and I’ve thought about it a bit, but am unable to find a simple experiment to prove or disprove it.

    However, there’s something wrong about the data — where we often find they hypothesize more than they know. It was a very long time ago and all the incomplete fragments of bones in question probably fit in a football field. In a point transition like the Ice Age it’s easy to miss by 100-1,000 years, which would radically change the story.

    Look at it by systems analysis in an ecosystem: if you have bison, you don’t have a double-bison and you don’t have a mini-bison. We don’t have an elephant and a double elephant. If you have a robin, you don’t have a double-robin. Why? Would would it eat? Double worms and double sunflower seeds? Because they fit within a system they can effectively only be a certain size or the whole system would need to alter around them. Then the human theory would have to also change the double-switchgrass and double-sunflowers. That seems a bridge too far.

    And yet somehow we DID have a sloth and a giant sloth, an armadillo and a giant armadillo. What trees would they climb, what holes would they dig? Who would be their predators? That suggests that the whole system, their food source, their cover, everything changed at once, and of the giants only those that could evolve smaller versions survived, and so many didn’t. Same thing happened in the previous change where the dinosaurs were multiples larger than the Ice Age animals. And then after that day there was nothing that large ever again, and no people to cause it. Then the same pattern occurs where almost none of the larger Ice Age fauna persist to this day – and only in areas outside the ice field – but the smaller ones do. In the age of dinosaurs, we had 2 meter dragonflies. As insects, if they could be that large today, they would be. They can’t: they cannot breathe, they cannot fly, they cannot eat, at least no one understands how they could. Same with armadillos: if they could be that large, somewhere they would be. But as I said, although I can see the same size-event event from the Cretaceous — and even further back in the Permian — I can’t construct an adequate experiment to substantiate it.

    #40199
    Phyllostachys
    Participant

    Point taken, and I certainly don’t believe that all extinctions that have occurred in the past 100,000 years are the result of human activity. Just that it is plausible that many of them were. I do not subscribe to the Noble Savage theory of human origins, and I trust that you don’t either. I believe that the destructive capacity of the human race is something that has always been with us, and that has been unleashed on an unprecedented global scale since the advent of modern industrial technology. But that’s a whole other conversation. In any case, thanks for your response, and I look forward to more of your guest posts in the future.

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