FrankRichards
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Kiwidoomer,
Some states have the property tax system you do.
The US states are clearly not soveriegn, but they do have far more autonomy than the internal subdivisions of most countries. (Yes, there are other countries like this.)
Tony Blair already put lots of “emergency” measures in place in Britain, with no particular excuse. As for Europe itself, it is my understanding that Civil Law countries can declare emergency powers pretty much whenever, with much more impunity than under Common Law.
Absolutely, that is exactly what I am telling you. When a farmer harvests crops out of the earth, he is depleting the soil to do it. You can recycle waste through the soil to maintain fertility, but over millenia as long as you run itnensive agriculture you eventualy deplete the soil and or water table. The Middle East is the result of that.
That is not true as a blanket statement. It is possible to farm indefinitely, even a fairly inhospitable climate like the Peruvian Andes. Indonesia and much of China have been farming roughly as long as the middle east. Egypt of course had the annual Nile flood, but thems the breaks.
Iceland turns out to be a perfect example. The first settlers tried to farm the same way they did in Norway (Another 2500 year success story) and turned much of island into desert in a couple of generations. At that point the Icelanders said the Old Norse equivalent of “Oh Sh*t”, and the Althing passed some fairly draconian laws, which have prevented further problems for 1000 years now.
They did the same thing with their fisheries in the 20th Century. Remember the Cod War with Britain? There’s currently a political fight in Iceland about the fishing boat captains privatizing too much public wealth. I think even Ash and Ilargi would agree that that is a much better problem to have than not having the wealth at all.
Don’t plan on kissing the internet good bye anytime soon. It was designed to be unkillable. (That is one of the reasons SOPA was withdrawn. DNS is much more resilient than Hollywood thought.)
Also, for reasons that only geezers remember, many bits of the internet were designed to work over dialup as well as nailed up.
In the instant case, telling my newsreader to follow alt.econoloon.TAE would simply get it right, whereas RSS wants me to subscribe to the comments on each post separately. Dave Winer never was a big picture guy.
Ash,
I had already read the Atlantic article before you wrote about it here. I understood it to be a much more general critique of The White Man’s Burden than the edited version that kept all the America-specific bad stuff and left out the swipes at Europe.
And I do object to your slant on it, because I have long considered the White Saviour Industrial Complex to be a European spesh-i-al-i-ty. The folks from the continent are far better at bungee do-gooding than we yanks.
Jee Zuss
I’m gonna miss this place, but I don’t water ski well enough for competitive shark jumping. I’ve been reading and commenting since Sharon Astyk vectored me here in ’08.
This is Ash’s second “America is exceptionally horrid but isn’t exceptional” post in the last 10 days. There is a definitional problem there dude.
And Illargi has been throwing out hints about not believing in peak oil since ’09. Even with his workload, that has been long enough to do the flippin’ research. Every time he talks about it, I get more convinced that he is talking about a ‘big kablooey’ peak oil that no numerate person ever believed in and totally ignoring that 7 years of $100/bbl oil has not managed to raise C&C production by more than 0.5%/year. That dude, is the old ‘undulating plateau’ if anything ever could be.
Jack,
That’s (major price decline in next 120 days) been the claim from the same crew since early 2010. It’s really time to revisit the analysis rather than just saying the same thing over and over.
Also, while I don’t doubt the price of paper oil can be manipulated, I question whether it could be jacked up for this long if there was physical supply available. The Arabs might go along, but Venezuela, Iran, Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia, UK…The list of countries is long, of cargoes, short. Even Russia appears to be pumping flat out.
Ilargi,
Are you referring to Stuart Staniford’s TOD article about January production numbers?
I admit to being surprised that C&C rose at all. However, a production rise of 1.5% over four years, with the price of Brent staying over $90 since mid 2009 seems a rather weak basis for questioning the whole peak oil concept. Note that ‘peak Oil’ does not need to mean ‘big kablooey a la 08 financial meltdown’. It can perfectly well be what I think we are seeing now, which is production being maintained only at prices high enough to be a drag on the real economy.
C&C plateaued, and price started up, in ’05 almost 7 years ago. Even with the crunch in 08-09, if there was oil out there that could be produced for less than say $65/bbl it would be coming online by now. It is obviously not.
Eugene12,
If you want to see provincial, check out a European on her first trip to North America.
Did you know that the RCMP doesn’t wear dress tunics on Bay St? And nobody wears stocking caps or mackinaws. Wow!
No cowboy hats on the Chicago El either!!. Who’da thunk it?For postgrad, Ontario is only a _little_ bit bigger than the EU 15.
Oh, and despite being an actual Yankee, I know that the Texas War of Independence was not exactly the gringo raid that for instance Hawaii was.
After Spain failed for 300 years to get New Mexico/Texas settled, the brand new Republic of Mexico deliberately offered very attractive terms to immigrants. Besides Usacos, they got a substantial number of Germans to take them up on it.
There were so many LEGAL immigrants that Mexican culture (always thin on the ground that far North) was going to get swamped. So Santa Ana reneged on the promises, apparently violating the Mexican Bill of Rights in the process. And, yup, the dudes from Dixie reached for their guns. Even paranoids do have real enemies.
It’s quite flattering to hear that the good ol’ US of A surpasses again. There we are, the cause of a literal majority of the evil in the world today. We’re Number One!
Stalin and Mao would be jealous. Is there some sort of handicap system to let Pol Pot and the Kim family maintain credit for their spectacular performances with limited resources?
el G,
Your brethren are back for the summer. Since we seem to be on the flyway to Labrador, it’s annoyingly noisy. The turkeys are having hysterics, and the dogs are explaining to each buzzard individually just how yummy it is.
They’re a few weeks early this year (Hi, Nassim) so we don’t have lambs or baby birds on the ground. Still, the sooner the Canuckistan-bound ones move on, the happier we’ll all be. The ones that stay for the summer soon figure out what their actual chances of living to brag about grabbing a live baby are, and everything calms down.
RE, The Russkis have been second tier players for all but 50 years out of the last thousand.
Russia was founded by vikings who weren’t good enough to become kings in the West or powers behind the throne in Constantinople. Who then got their asses kicked by the Mongols.
One of the few things the Brits, French and Germans all believe in is that Poland, Bohemia and Hungary are the end of European Civilization.
If you want to dispute a transaction, whether for fraud or because you’re unsatisfied with the merchandise, you are better off with the credit card, at least inside the US.
This doesn’t bother me for gas or groceries, but I keep it in mind when ordering over the interwebs.
Ash,
No joy. No “Comments” listing, still the same three non-intuitive clicks to actually reach the forum.
Ash,
Without disputing your main point, you’re seriously misrepresenting our distant ancestors. (Indo-European. I expect we’re kin at a nearer time than that.)
The dawn to dusk work thing is an artifact of agriculture. Hunter-gatherers had a lot more free time. The pravda is that the few remaining hunter gatherers, mostly on marginal land, work about 25 hours/week.
Also that kind of part time specialization was not limited to TOSA. There was someone who taught the kids who were better trackers than their own dad. There was someone who made a spearpoint faster and better than anyone else. Someone who knew which mushrooms were delicious, which ones made reindeer fly, and which ones killed you.
RE,
Just a bit tired of the meme that western civilization is now and always has been nothing but a parasite on the rest of the world.
I’m personally a big fan of vaccination and electric lights
RE,
It’s not that I forgot them. I was reacting to the all too standard implication that the West contributed nothing, just stole.
Physics, chemistry, engineering, vaccination and sewers. Yes, other civilizations contributed, but, hey, we have electric lights and don’t have smallpox.
Spin me how either of those is bad.
Alex,
If you are a proper TAEr you have a religious belief that the financial collapse will happen faster than the hydrocarbon collapse.
Since this sort of reduces to ‘engineers are better at their jobs than financiers are at theirs’ I remain strongly tempted to agree. However, one must recall that the engineers are dealing with Mother Nature, and the financiers with politicians. It is possible to slip something past either referee, but which one is harder?
Frank
