gurusid
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Hi Folks,
Here’s one reason why energy systems don’t come back quickly: https://nebula.tv/videos/practical-engineering-what-is-a-black-start-of-the-power-grid – and that’s the stuff that’s relatively easy to explain, don’t even start with phase/load balancing and power factor correction, or a host of other less tangible issues: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.5.5020/full/.
Also, most likely why Russia wants to keep the nuclear plants up and running as black start primers. If they go, it’s game over, pretty much; and it’s not just in the obvious places either; any grid system that comes under pressure from raw energy material supply/demand increase will see similar issues. Welcome to the beginning of the end of hyper-complexity; all hail Kunstler et al.
L,
Sid.Delusion, Mass Delusion and Simple Math.
Or, the Monster Under the Bed Swallowing Virus? (MUBSV – you heard it here first!)
Here’s a nice bed time story for you…India Population (approx from web): 1,380,004,385 / uk Pop (approx) 67,886,011
So India is 20x (approx) UK Pop.UK Current covid numbers (over approximately 1 year of viral activity: aka per annum):
United Kingdom
Coronavirus Cases:
4,406,946
Deaths:
127,434
Recovered:
4,197,672 (From: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/)
Death rate = 2.89% (127,434/4,406,946 x 100)Proportion of UK population currently infected: = 6.49%
Potential similar number of Indians who could get infected at this rate (all things being equal): 89,585,537 & number of dead @ 2.89% =: 2,590,511 per annumOver a year of 52 weeks, that’s looking like an average of 49,817 deaths per week.
For a city of 1,800,000 we would expect an average of 116820 infected, with
3,376 per annum, or 64 Covid deaths per week – on average…
Population Dynamics meets Thanatophobia anyone? Immortality should be left to Gods and small children – go ask Stephen Jenkinson: about Death-Phobic Culture.
As for sicentia – knowledge and techne – art, “Doubt is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is absurd”, by Voltaire, possible… For me a true scientist uses his ‘art’, that is technology, to test the truth of his knowledge, all the while remembering the limits of all knowledge, rather than using his knowledge to prove the truth of his art. Life is a mystery and Reality is…
Best Wishes,
L,
Sid.Delusion, Mass Delusion and Simple Math.
Or, the Monster Under the Bed Swallowing Virus? (MUBSV – you heard it here first!)
Here’s a nice bed time story for you…India Population (approx from web): 1,380,004,385 / uk Pop (approx) 67,886,011
So India is 20x (approx) UK Pop.UK Current covid numbers (over approximately 1 year of viral activity: aka per annum):
United Kingdom
Coronavirus Cases:
4,406,946
Deaths:
127,434
Recovered:
4,197,672 (From: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/)
Death rate = 2.89% (127,434/4,406,946 x 100)Proportion of UK population currently infected: = 6.49%
Potential similar number of Indians who could get infected at this rate (all things being equal): 89,585,537 & number of dead @ 2.89% =: 2,590,511 per annumOver a year of 52 weeks, that’s looking like an average of 49,817 deaths per week.
For a city of 1,800,000 we would expect an average of 52,020 per annum, or smack on 1000 Covid deaths per week – on average… are we there yet? No? Forget 10 or even 110… try closer to 1000, per week, or 142 per day with an extra one on Sunday.
Are we OK now? I’ll leave the light on, just don’t look under the bed!
Population Dynamics meets Thanatophobia anyone? Immortality should be left to Gods and small children – go ask Stephen Jenkinson: about Death-Phobic Culture.
As for sicentia – knowledge and techne – art, “Doubt is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is absurd”, by Voltaire, possible… For me a true scientist uses his ‘art’, that is technology, to test the truth of his knowledge, all the while remembering the limits of all knowledge, rather than using his knowledge to prove the truth of his art. Life is a mystery and Reality is…
Best Wishes,
L,
Sid.HI Ilargi,
“The government is intentionally doing such a shitty job, might as well let the for-profit boys do it.”
Yes I get irony, but if only the privit corporate sector (deliberate typo – it should be ‘cut’ regularly – in the past ‘corporations were created for a purpose THEN destroyed) could do better. No such luck looking at Rail, Justice and a whole load other areas including the existing privatised sections of so called NHS – optic, orthodontic, real estate, traffic management/storage, drug and equipment provision (Group 4, Carillion, “Big Pharma”?).
John Gall’s ‘System antics’ points to how systems that are set up to do something, often a noble thing, tend towards becoming self obsessed entities growing uncontrollably. Welcome to corporatocracy. Add in thanatophobia and a denial of death and consultant-ism we have a perfect mix of extremely expensive treatments developed by highly paid consultants – experts in their own
ivory towersfields aimed at morbidly sick people, whose suffering and dignity is made all the worse by being paraded on freak show tv that lauds the ‘wonderful genius’ of saidfreak show proprietorsdoctors. Elephant Man anyone? https://youtu.be/sF19L00KbAI
There is a point in the film where the doctor asks the question: “Are we any different than the Freak Show owner?” … or words to that effect.
Still, apparently its all about the economy, so I must be stoopid…How impossible is it to get basic health care for everyone at reasonable cost with low levels of iatrogenesis – illness caused by the medical system itself – witness knee-jerk reaction of intubating patients that actually causes higher risk of death rather than simply supplying the patient with oxygen. Note: BoJo got oxygen… can we liberate government form the neo-liberal intubation and put it onto to some inspirational oxygen?
L,
Sid.Hi Illargi,
Not posted here for years. However as regards your notion that what you say does not have any weight, I disagree. I think you have far far more weight than you might think. So I for one take it seriously when you post certain stuff that is ‘off key’ in my judgement. For instance your assumption that ‘nuclear energy’ is inherently unclean is disingenuous. Yes the current scam of using bomb making factories for electrical power production is nuts, I agree. However, done properly with the right approach, nuclear power from fission represents a very useful source for possible 100’s of years to come. Unfortunately it is on the level of ‘rocket science’, and as the understanding of burning radio-isotopes safely is still being researched, there is a lot of polishing of the techniques to be done. I was going to use technological advances like comparing the Ford model ‘T’ to the refinement of a modern sports car such as the Bugatti Veyron – then realised its insanity writ large and a perfect example of the problem of what’s wrong with the entire human species in my judgement! Ok bad example, – perhaps I’d use the sopwith camel compared to a modern jet liner, but again I meet with human stupid full frontal, as in Boeing Boeing Gone!. Perhaps a 1950s IBM mainframe computer compare to a palm top device such as a Samsung Galaxy…
However as regards the safe burning of radioactive isotopes, the Russians are doing just that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYbm-ecT700
I posted this a while back at Orlov’s site, which is where I go the link from:
https://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2019/06/nuclear-meltdown-at-hbo.html— Quote – Thread start: —
“Pamela Storer said…Apropos the topic, and Russian Nuclear Energy, this has just turned up on YouTube.
People might be interested to see the strides ahead in this field Russia has made – far in advance of anywhere else I think.
Sunday, June 16, 2019 at 11:24:00 AM EDTMy Reply:
@ Pamela Storer,Thanks for the link. Wot, no touch screens wifi or blue tooth?! LOL. No seriously interesting video about using ANY hot isotopes to produce heat and hence generating potential. Personally I think there is a very bad karmic load on those who ‘weaponised’ nuclear energy – I gave up a potential career in physics as I wanted nothing to do with it (oh yes the MIC is NOT a conspiracy). My only addition would be to say that some of the thorium experimentation was along similar lines, and of course once one masters the engineering finesse to burn any heavy element safely without the emphasis on producing fissile material for bomb making, oops sorry generating power, their energy future is all but secured, barring any ‘first strike’ of course, which Russia has cleverly negated with its new (very) tactical highly targetted low yield system Dmitri commented on a while back.
The UKs first ever nuclear power generator next to Calder hall had been developed, not as many think to generate power, but to ‘dump’ the excess heat from the nuclear reaction processes being used to produce fissile material for bombs, something the British governments was obsessed with at the time, and did not care very much how they obtained it. The fire at the UKs earlier bomb making factory at Calderhead, the old ‘carbon’ reactor, came after the new reactor had been switch on, but so desperate were they for fissile material, they carried on using it. It was ironic that when Chernobyl went up, TPTB suddenly discovered heavy contamination in Wales, and a ban on eating welsh lamb went into immediate effect, and was still current some 30 years later. Only the isotope profile was not just from Chernobyl… there had been many more leaks and f*ck ups prior to the grand finale fire of 1957. Nowadays, Sellafield as its been renamed (yeah, rebranding – the solution to radioactive contamination) is apparently the warehouse for half the worlds weapons grade plutonium:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1367776/UK-Government-covered-nuclear-reactor-blaze-caused-death-cancer.html
Yeah not the most reliable source, but hey…
Oh and for those who didn’t get the touchscreen/wifi joke, solid engineering in critical applications is all about making something work under arduous conditions, not how pretty or bling it looks. I hope they stick with this idea and don’t go down the ‘fly by wire’ nightmare to gain foreign sales through ‘user friendliness’ etc. Just ask Boing… er actually no don’t.Until the nuclear narrative in a society is cleansed of the horror and trauma of nuclear war no sense will ever see the light of day.
Best Wishes,
L,
Sid.
Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at 8:00:00 AM EDT ”—End Quote—
Finally:
“Three great forces rule the world: stupidity, fear and greed.”
― Albert Einstein
Nuff said,
L,
Sid.HI Ilargi,
Raising the dead eh?! Must be why I’m back.
The problem is there are no problems. A problem by its nature suggests a solution, and as there are no ‘solutions’ there are no problems.
What there are in fact are systems, as there always have been. These systems are myriad in form and nature, and interact with both themselves and other systems in a highly complex way. They are also constantly changing in a dynamic equilibrium, new ones evolving, while others both new and old die off. The much used term hyper-complexity doesn’t even come close. We, who think we are autonomous individuals, are part of the human system, which itself has myriad subsystems, from language and thought to all sorts of knowledge systems and systems of technique, euphemistically called technology (which is a bit like calling the animal kingdom zoology – any ology is the study of something, not the thing in itself). All of these systems are in a state of flux, which is what Schrodinger was perhaps alluding to in his 1944 work “What is Life”. Think for a moment when that book was written… and all of the ‘systems’ that have come and gone, and those that are still stubbornly clinging on. The most stubborn thought system is that of capitalism, and is the religion of today; why else would 400,000 copies of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” be given away to high school students every year by the Ayn Rand Institute’. Her objectivist philosophy however is a closed system, and as such suffers all the ‘problems’ that such a system will incur, it will drown in its own excrement, or be forced to eat it, or both.
“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”
— Ayn Rand, Atlas ShruggedOh those patriarchal heroes, written by a woman no less, but then she was pretty down on her own sex, apparently stating on a television interview that a woman should never become president. Bad luck Hilary… It is in my mind, the last bastion of the reductionist/materialist/egoist mindset that emerged out of the first phase of the industrial/scientific revolution, before the realisations of quantum physics and systemantics took hold, and is epitomised in the ‘Jetsons’ cartoon of the early sixties; the notion that material progress (on the back of neo-liberal capitalist idealogy) would take us all to a technological utopia. That this dinosaur 1950s L. Ron Hubbard-esq system has survived points only to one thing, that it has been adopted as a religion by those who run the ‘Empire’, much as the decaying Roman empire adopted Christianity and became the Holy Roman Catholic Empire. After all, if god is dead as Nietzsche suggested, and all hope of a spiritual life, what else is left to idolise but material creation? Arise the empire of consumption. Yet as we know, all empires rise, exist for a while and then collapse, usually down to resource depletion/destruction, economic collapse, and/or invasion by another empire. Also their leaders always end up corrupted, almost as if its a natural law.
However, unlike all other forms of ‘super colony’, from ants to reindeer stuck on islands with no predators, humans have an ability for reflection, that for some members of the species at any rate goes beyond the current models of reality, and allows the possibility of the formation of new models. Like new species, it will be down to pure chance whether these new systemic models such as permaculture or the ‘gift economy’ (Eisenstein) will survive the coming extinction of the existing dinosaurs, and find niches to ride out the storm and take over when the big beasts are all dead. One thing is for sure, symbiotic cooperation and not just tooth and claw competition is a key to survival of any species. No one species can ever dominate an ecosystem, as an ecosystem itself relies upon diversity. That much systems ecology has taught us. Meadows predictions are bang on, he was just wrong about any of it being a ‘problem’.
As for Zombies, if Atlas Shrugged, Lazarus laughed!
L,
Sid.Hi Ilargi,
Check out Yanis giving the low down at teh RSA:
https://www.thersa.org/events/2016/04/europe-austerity-and-the-threat-to-global-stability/.L,
Sid.Hi Ilargi,
Here I have an idea for you. What say you and me set up a BS (bull sh*t) export/import company. You’re based in Holland right (? ) which is a bit low lying. UK has stacks of BS so we can offload some to boost your land levels with added fertility for growing all those tulips. We can use the eurotunnel so also boosting the French economy which is about to keel over any ways (the Elite are scarpering like rats leaving the sinking ship). We could use both rail and freight, there by incentivising the building of the HS2 (high speed no.2’s). If we insist on electric vehicles for the road side haulage collection from all the local source points (house of commons ‘enclosure’, government think tanks, utilities boardrooms etc) we could also restart the UK engineering base, based on Dyson technology for instance. That would solve the front end collection problem – we just vacuum the sh*t up! 😆
Hell it might work for Hull:
Vai yahoo:Don’t be fooled by GDP – this is a fake boom
By Guest writer Godfrey Bloom| Talking Politics – Wed, Nov 6, 2013. http://www.politics.co.ukThere is much confusion in the minds of the media and electorate as to exactly which direction the UK economy is actually travelling. This is not easy to guess. GDP is frequently heralded as the most reliable compass. It is most certainly not, if indeed it ever was.
Let us take a look at what GDP is. How is it defined? I am comfortable with the Penguin Dictionary of Economics: “As a measure of the total flow of goods and services produced by the economy over a specific time period”. There are a number of caveats attached but they are simple and non controversial and this is not an economics paper but an aide memoire for the interested layman.
Let me give two examples of why it is such an unreliable measure of economic success. Using my Euro-constituency as my first, let us imagine I was a benevolent plenipotentiary in Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire and my subjects judged me on GDP growth for the kingdom.
At present this figure is close to zero, stifled by 20% VAT, employment legislation, business rates, EU regulation and the usual list of either engines of modern government designed to place a millstone around the neck of the wealth-creating sector.
However, I have a cunning plan. I intend to build an earth mountain on the south bank of the Humber. I intend to create this by digging the most enormous hole on the north bank. This will double the tolls on the Humber Bridge, expand massively the haulage business so create jobs for truck drivers and hence transport cafes and service stations. Health and safety expenditure will, of course expand exponentially, the council will take on more people as will highway repair companies. Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire will experience a bonanza. House prices will soar and the high street retail trade will recover. So what’s not to like?
…
Let us look again then at recent UK numbers. Zero point eight per cent growth in last quarter’s GDP. But what does it really mean? Money printing on an enormous scale to support the banks and recycle money into area of financial assets. Mud pies only with money substituting mud. So real money is degraded, interest rates on savings are negative, those on fixed incomes are crucified. Inflation figures are skewed by government who pretend all is well.
Because it is a financial fake boom, the apples never fall far from the tree. So London booms and the rest of the country flat-lines at best. The national debt grows, the party goes on, no longer good quality wine in the punch but home distilled rot gut. That is what this government’s figures are. Moonshine.
The government has printed £350 billion in its term of office. It borrowed £120 billion last year, spent nearly 50% of GDP and the national debt climbs at ten per cent a year. For what? A measly 0.8% in the last quarter and the government is boasting about it. How the Far East economies must laugh at us as they quietly accumulate our gold reserves and our manufacturing companies.
Godfrey Bloom is an independent member of the European Parliament for Yorkshire and the Humber
On arrival in Holland, it gets offloaded to boost existing land levels or even reclaim more, enough for another Oostvaardersplassen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tofJFxKOVao
Ain’t nature a bitch! Bring back the wolves or maybe the people could go ‘Future Primitive’
John Zerzan:Nonetheless, the literature can provide highly useful assistance, if approached with an appropriate method and awareness and the desire to proceed past its limitations. In fact, the weakness of more or less orthodox modes of thinking can and does yield to the demands of an increasingly dissatisfied society. Unhappiness with contemporary life becomes distrust with the official lies that are told to legitimate that life, and a truer picture of human development emerges. Renunciation and subjugation in modern life have long been explained as necessary concomitants of “human nature.” After all, our pre-civilized existence of deprivation, brutality, and ignorance made authority a benevolent gift that rescued us from savagery. “Cave man” and `Neanderthal’ are still invoked to remind us where we would be without religion, government, and toil.
This ideological view of our past has been radically overturned in recent decades, through the work of academics like Richard Lee and Marshall Sahlins. A nearly complete reversal in anthropological orthodoxy has come about, with important implications. Now we can see that life before domestication/agriculture was in fact largely one of leisure, intimacy with nature, sensual wisdom, sexual equality, and health. This was our human nature, for a couple of million years, prior to enslavement by priests, kings, and bosses.
:dry:
L,
Sid.HI Ilargi,
Its the final evisceration of empire, instead of the centre exploiting the periphery, the periphery now eviscerates the centre.
Besides, in a neo-liberal global economy, being owned by the PRC is nationalisation. The people (Chinese) will be fine… :blink:
L,
Sid.Hi Steve,
On energy/food budgets, this UN report attempts to address the issues
One of the contributers, Gunnar Rundgren sums it up here:
A mosaic of regenerative agriculture systems
“The world needs a paradigm shift in agricultural development: from a “green revolution” to an “ecological intensification” approach. This implies a rapid and significant shift from conventional, monoculture-based and high- external-input-dependent industrial production towards mosaics of sustainable, regenerative production systems that also considerably improve the productivity of small-scale farmers. We need to recognize that a farmer is not only a producer of agricultural goods, but also a manager of an agro-ecological system that provides quite a number of public goods and services (e.g. water, soil, landscape, energy, biodiversity, and recreation).”
This is one of the key messages of a new report from United Nations Conference of Trade and Development, UNCTAD. The Trade and Environment Report 2013, subtitled Wake up before it is too late: Make agriculture truly sustainable now for food security in a changing climate, warns that continuing rural poverty, persistent hunger around the world, growing populations, and mounting environmental concerns must be treated as a collective crisis. It says that urgent and far-reaching action is needed before climate change begins to cause major disruptions to agriculture, especially in developing countries.
Hey at least they’re recognising that the current system doesn’t exactly work very well… 🙂
L,
Sid.Hi Folks,
Oh yes:
From ZH JPM Sees “Most Extreme Ever Excess Liquidity” Bubble After $3 Trillion “Created” In First 9 Months Of 2013Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/28/2013 15:04 -0400
“…just don’t ask what happens when the music ends.” Which is exactly what TAE has addressed in their ‘Century of Challenges/World of Change’ presentation.
Or… will they allow the currency to ‘devalue’ so that you’ll need all the ‘liquidity’ just to buy a loaf of bread. And no, I’m not talking ‘inflation’ here, but some perverse systemic manipulation unlike anything ever done before. I mean what’s to stop them pumping the QE handle forever until those that benefit own everything. Then they just reset the game by issuing a ‘new’ currency system, cancelling all ‘their debt’, but transferring all the other ‘private’ debt. If the system is completely rigged, with strange ‘flash crashes’ and ‘flash corrections’ on the stock markets, with commodity markets manipulated who knows where this is going? I think humanity has reached a historical disconnect: this is NOT Rome. Rome did not have (to my knowledge) high frequency trading, flash crashes and POMO (permanently open market operations). Maybe I’m just too stupid to understand all the ‘market fundamentals’ or to see the obvious that the ‘system’ will just crash; but something tells me that ‘they’ who are running the ‘show’ will not let that happen until they are good and ready. And when they are, I think that we will all be surprised… :unsure:
L,
Sid.Hi Folks,
Interesting goings on in the halls of ‘power’:
Will Heaven of the Telegraph:
Nuclear power vs wind farms: the infographic the Government doesn’t want you to see
Of course if the nuke plant were to ‘malfunction’ there is the (no doubt remote) possibility that a large part of the west country real estate might not be as desirable as it was… :dry:
Dilemmas dilemmas dilemmas, of course using less is not an option…
Via Press Association:
PM urged to act over cold homes
Fuel poverty campaigners have written to Prime Minister David Cameron demanding that party leaders act on the “national crisis” of cold homes.
The UK is second only to Estonia among European nations for the number of people who are struggling to pay their energy bills, according to research by the fuel poverty alliance Energy Bill Revolution found.
The alliance, which includes Age UK, Barnardo’s, Consumer Futures and National Energy Action, has told leaders that investment in “super insulation” for the nation’s homes is the only way to end the “scourge” of fuel poverty and the best way to bring down energy bills.
L,
Sid.Hi Ilargi,
Thanks for a great overview of the UK and EU energy crisis. I’ll keep my usual soliloquy short. I have my suspicions that ‘solar’ is being used to meet the 15% renewables by 2020 commitment purely on ‘nameplate’ capacity – that it gives a high capacity figure for relatively little or no cash outlay – the ultimate in empty bag handling. So not only do they get to claim an over inflated generating capacity from solar renewables, but its gets paid for by someone else – what’s not to like? Politicians get great photo ops on a cloud less midsummer day at the only time it generates any where near its ‘name plate’ capacity, meanwhile midwinter the energy companies get to fire up their gas and coal ‘standby’ plants at a bonus rate. Welcome to the new [strike]robber[/strike] energy barons! :dry:
Mind you, wrt the Arctic Bubble, keep an eye on Unst property prices! 🙂
+ Brand and Paxman on changing the current system & Brand on not voting due to the ‘elites’ current control of everything:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3YR4CseY9pk
Within the existing paradigm change is not dramatic enough not radical enough… When there is a genuine option vote for that … why pretend why be complicit in this ridiculous illusion… Occupy movement… 1% vs. 99%… for the first time in a generation people are aware of massive corporate and economic exploitation.
Welcome to UK politics, where politicians are comedians, and the comedians are politicians! 😆
L,
Sid.Hi Folks,
Ah ha, so this is how you ‘clean up’ a nuke site:
(Reuters) By Antoni Slodkowski and Mari Saito, Fri Oct 25, 2013 12:07pm BST. Special Report:
Tetsuya Hayashi went to Fukushima to take a job at ground zero of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. He lasted less than two weeks.
Hayashi, 41, says he was recruited for a job monitoring the radiation exposure of workers leaving the plant in the summer of 2012. Instead, when he turned up for work, he was handed off through a web of contractors and assigned, to his surprise, to one of Fukushima’s hottest radiation zones.
But the real insight is the use of ‘debt slaves’:
Soon there could be plenty of opportunity in the UK as interest rates could rise sooner than ‘expected’. Debt peonage in a nuclear age… :dry:
L,
Sid.
Hi sensato,
Yes, you mean this:
This one is interesting as it has the 1950s sub records in it:
And this one from the National Snow and Ice Data Centre:
In the first Daily Arctic Sea Ice Extent graph in your link, trending on the green 2013 line seemed to have stopped on 7/7/13, but its ‘volumetrically’ albeit marginally more than 2012. Maybe the earth has given us a last minute reprieve to turn things around. :unsure:
L,
Sid.Hi Ilargi,
Nice article!
So you have Chinese and French companies build – and own! – Britain’s future energy supplies (the expertise is no longer domestically available). How does that make you feel? Think it’s a good idea to hand over control of your energy needs to anyone but your own people? How about your drinking water? Or the air you breathe?
Well where did you expect the neo-liberal deregulation privatise everything experiment to end? In an equitable socialist nibbana? As for Monibot losing his marbles, have you ever read “Heat”? Talk about techno-narcism and too much magic George is obviously an alumni of the Hogwarts ‘green’ school. Still at least he has a plan, unlike any UK government for oh about the last forty years… :dry:
You see its all about right wing divine wrath against the unions, epitomised in the ‘Dagenham Girls’ who brought production at the then Ford Dagenham plant to a halt in 1968. That and the entrenchment of the left/right union/free market ideologies through the seventies and eighties that has seen a devastating evisceration of the heart of British manufacturing. The latest is the Grangemouth refinery closure closed on the back of a so called ‘union dispute’. Not to even mention the outright ‘theft’ of the Post Office – watch them sack all the workers and then [strike]re-employ[/strike] create double the number of zero contract unsecured no pension jobs – no doubt using poor Chinese immigrants who lost their own livelihood when the local mandarins built a ‘ghost town’ on their land. The so called ‘elite’ in this so called country decided a long time ago that the British worker was not worth even the slightest consideration. Foreign workers were to be invited in to show the ‘British working class’ how it should be done (as it had been in the colonies aka slaves). It was and still is the final ‘act of enclosure’ the taking away of common rights to a decent livelihood. All are now slaves, foreign and indigenous, slaves often in every way the brutish reality of that word relates to, but also their ‘owners’ as well slaves to debt and to energy. It would not surprise me if there is indeed soon a tax on ‘air’ as well.
As for houses, from an Englishman’s home is his castle to castles in the sky:
.. well its up in the air anyway 😆
Housing ‘dream’ programs are back with a vengeance, with Sarah Beeny’s (a UK property developer who cashed in big time in the boom years pre-2008 with a tv series called ‘property ladder’, and the less popular Property Snakes and Ladders – wonder why that was?) currently starring in Double your house for Half the Money which in one program a couple bought an old doctors surgery in urban semi detached land, went mad with a rebuild and are now thinking its worth £2.5 million – thinking mind you as I doubt anyone would pay that for the monstrosity. At least the BBC is more in tune with the times with its House that £100k Built. But the ubiquitous ‘Grand Designs’ is everywhere, with a new series on designer sheds (well its all the rage don’t yew know). Though Reality is setting in:
Leah Hyslop in the Telegraph:
‘Grand Designs’ converted water tower has £2m knocked off price
A Grade II-listed water tower which appeared on Grand Designs is on sale for £4.5m, nearly £2m less than its original asking price.Lets hope shed or castle they are well insulated, lest we get a cold winter – Global Sea ice didn’t get the memo about ‘warming’:
Anarctic Sea ice stobbornly refuses to stop setting new records for Maxima:
While current Arctic sea ice is well within the ‘average’ range:
Which might cause a delay in Cameron’s growth in the Arctic ploy… :unsure:Grangemouth Update- Wages frozen and pensions cut and no strike for three years:
Threatened closure comes form excessive EU capacity, and ‘shrinking demand’ (see: ‘A Barrel Full’ blog). But as regards China’s interest in UK energy (from ‘killajoules’, a Barrel Full sub-site):
Next it might be new Chinese built coal plants, as the ‘large reserves of UK coal’ were discussed on BBC’s Question Time as debate raged about the whole ‘nuke thing… :whistle:
L,
Sid.Hi Sensato,
Yeah, two interesting idea sets about what’s going on and how it will play out. Combine them both and its pretty much what TAE are about. No 56 & No 39 are pretty good too – in fact most of them are really great. However, reality as always will fall between all opinions… :dry:
L,
Sid.Hi Folks,
There are [strike]millions of Americans[/strike] billions globally who’ve been unemployed so long they no longer even count as unemployed. There are [strike]millions[/strike] billions more working jobs that don’t pay the bills. This can and will not simply be undone by a growing economy. Many are scarred for life, and that certainly goes for the huge numbers of children growing up in poverty and now seeing their food stamps cut to boot. Leaving aside whether we see rising inequality as a good or a bad thing, we need to realize that it is a choice we make for ourselves and others: there is no need for [strike]25% of our children to be too poor to function well[/strike] 1.5 million children to die every year from hunger, there is enough wealth in our societies to provide for them. We would just need to redistribute that wealth, and to limit inequality to the levels we had when our economies were doing better than they ever have, before or since. Would that really be such a bad thing? Are we truly better off creating this fake Darwinian jungle we have today? Just asking.
And then of course there’s that last remaining question: “How long do you think such a society can last?”
…just added a few tweaks… I think your picture at the start says it all really – nothing has changed. But just to add Total percentage of U.S. households that are at risk of hunger = 11% Percent of world population considered to be starving = 33% So they’ve still got some catching up to do…
As for how long it will last? How long has any despotic regime/Empire lasted? Despite falling energy reserves and increasing costs of extraction, there is still way more than enough energy to keep the elite and their military boot boys in control for decades, if not centuries. Just look how long the Edo period of Japan lasted (1603–1867) with its own brutal social structure with its caste system of Samurai, Peasants, Artisans and Merchants, with an ‘outcaste’ class of baraku, yet very sustainable ‘society’ as discussed by Azby Brown:
[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uvdT0c4blU[/video]
To be honest it is becoming clear that we are seeing the beginnings of a global feudal system, which like all ‘feudal systems, has an all powerful elite commanding a loyal guard of enforcement. And as for ‘society’ making a choice – its doubtful if there ever was one given the deluded power crazed nature of most humans, after all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
L,
Sid.And this from the ‘shutdown’ agreement – perhaps what they wanted all along???
From ZeroHedge – Submitted by Simon Black of Sovereign Man:Slowly at first, then all at once
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
The dialogue above is from Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises.
….
As part of the bargain codified in HR 2775 (which President Obama signed into law), the Treasury Department is authorized to SUSPEND the debt ceiling. In other words, for all intents and purposes, there is now NO LIMIT government borrowing.
This limitless borrowing authority will expire on February 7, 2014. But it sets the precedent that dismissing the debt ceiling is a perfectly viable course of action.
Congress has effectively removed their handcuffs… so you can almost assuredly bet down the road that this provision will be extended, and ultimately become permanent.
No one in the Land of the Free seems to care. But foreigners do. The lead commentary out of China’s state media the other day was very clear in its position:
“It is perhaps a good time for the befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanized world.”
Watch that debt increase from 20 to 200 to 2000000 times… etc. At precisely what point it goes from gradually to suddenly remains to be seen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=iFDe5kUUyT0
L,
Sid.Hi Dave,
Sorry out of sync here – I was chomping on a reply to Ilargi – see above.
yes good point about ‘loans’ drying up – which is my point about a/the shift in assets ownership taking place – which TAE have oft talked of and Ilagi alludes to in the above article- to the mega wealthy. Both by buying up ‘real estate’ in choice hotspots around the globe, not so much as a capital growth option but more as a return on capital which in a zirp environment they cannot get anywhere else. Also above and beyond the j6p bag holders, many ‘players’ in the super elite property game will still be ‘wealthy’ even if their properties crash as many have large deposits or are out and out cash buyers. Those middle income/class buyers on the other hand who are already maxed out and have gone for the gov’t ‘help line’ will probably get fried if/when prices tumble and rates rise even just a bit. They will get repossessed and the aforementioned mega wealthy will just hoover up the remains, and probably put up the rent to boot! Unless some nice new regime were to bring in rent controls… not that anyone will have a job to pay either mortgage or rent soon the way things are going. :dry:
Cycles. Things move in cycles – and sometimes, supercycles.
…and sometimes things just fall off a cliff:
:whistle:Edit: Ha, this on ZH:
Home-Flipping Bubble Bursts For All But The Uber-Wealthy… Where It Explodes By 350%
Pretty soon ‘they’ will own everything… “…its a game, their game, and you ain’t nothin’ but dust on their pawns.” :dry:
L,
Sid.Yo ilargi,
…I dare you to explain both the correlation AND the consequences we can derive from on the one hand those graphs and on the other the population one, which will look pretty similar.
Not that I’m an economist 😆 or would even want to pretend to be one, but short answer to both is that they look suspiciously exponential and we all know where that ends.
The ‘long’ answer needs a few more random charts and actually the one I was going to add anyway, apart from some nice info-graphics here from demonacracy.info, was this one by Gail Tverberg on her ‘ourfiniteworld’ website:
The correlation is plain to see (from wiki this one):
However referencing the 1970’s (as that was what Dave was doing), the US debt chart goes from 400 billion to over 23trillion that’s about a 60 fold increase. Population has only gone up about 2 fold (3.5 billion around 1970), the same interestingly for energy consumption.
Given that debt to GDP now stands at about 3 times what it was in the 70s you could say ‘real’ US debt has increased by a factor of 20 times.
But what is also missing in these charts is the ‘depreciation’ of the currency. Here is ancient Rome as a comparison (from financemymoney.com):
So how does all this tie together? Energy (as Ayres and Warr have shown) has been the real driver of economic growth and also via its technological application to food production via firstly mechanisation and then via the green revolution, of human population. However trying to say that one thing leads to another is misleading. There are many cultural factors as well as economic that affect population, as seen in declining populations in some developed countries (excluding immigration). Also the ‘measure’ of GDP is very controversial as no one is quite sure exactly what it is supposed to mean, as many factors such as unpaid housework and voluntary labour together with environmental degradation and varying living standards are considered externalities. However, as this graph of ‘Real’ GDP – that is inflation adjusted show, it has indeed roughly tippled since the 1970s (from measuringworth.com):
https://www.measuringworth.com/usgdp/ Select 1970-2009, then plot ‘real’ GDP.
Given that ‘price’ inflation has been about 1200% since 1970 and US debt has gone up over 5000% if we take the 400billion to 23trillion figures, or a more inflation adjusted figure of 1900% for a 20 fold increase relative to GDP! And this is only the start of it (or the end) as being exponential, the slope looks likely to only increase – Al Bartlet’s ‘doubling’. So only at one minute to midnight do we find that another doubling will fill the fish pond or in this case crash the economy/ecosphere. Even if we found another planet it would take – metaphorically – only another minute to fill that one as well, as the ‘doubling time’ is only a minute.
The caveat is that energy production has slowed all by itself so to speak; i.e. – ‘doubling’ every two decades or so. Oil per capita consumption has already started to decline, but this is more than made up for by large increases in coal and natural gas (and we’ve all seen where ‘shale’ gas is going right here on TAE):
From ourfiniteworld.com:
Thus the ‘really real’ engine of growth – energy itself, though having increased recently along with population is also getting a lot more expensive as the costs of extracting harder to get and lower grade reserves starts to impinge on that ‘doubling rate’. In all the excitement of the last two centuries of economic growth, we seem to have plum forgotten that these energy resources are limited. So you have to ask yourself, do you think they will double again in the next twenty or so years? Well, do you feel lucky, [strike]punk[/strike] people ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xjr2hnOHiM
(Its empty of course…)
Quite what is going to happen to all that debt barring some form of hyper devaluation is anybodies guess – deflation anyone? :whistle:
So in a nut shell cheap energy has fuelled a vast engine of ‘economic production’ mostly of consumer junk that has in turn driven the ‘debt’ bubble: that is the issuance of pseudo ‘money’ issued in the form of debt to buy said junk, with increasing numbers of ‘bag holders’ lining up to join the party. The immediate consequence of the slowing of the until recently increasing flow of cheap fuel has been price increases of energy which has increased the prices of everything else and slowed the ‘engine’ of economic ‘growth’ necessary to service all the debt, which in turn has meant less ‘pseudo money’ to buy said junk thus slowing said engine even further. The consequence has been central banks issuing their own ‘pseudo money’ in the form of QE to keep the banks who usually issue the pseudo money for junk alive. Unfortunately they are so sick that they refuse to keep issuing the pseudo money to the bag holders who are now forming ever longer queues as they have yet to stop breeding. Quite when and where it will all end nobody really knows, as the doubling time intervals are, relative to human lifetimes, quite long and we are only five years into a crisis that to have any real bearing on the matter probably needs twenty years or more to run – that’s the rough doubling time for energy from the graph above… :unsure:
As for consequences… Ya Feelin’ lucky? 😆
L,
Sid.Hi Dave,
i like this one:
From Future Timeline.net
Now what was that thing about exponential functions… :whistle:
Of course the GDP has a similar profile:
…so debt to GDP isn’t that bad…
…but look at the steepness of the ‘curve’: if that was surf dude you’d be looking at wipeout time! :ohmy:
L,
Sid.Hi Folks,
Actually this situation points to another unsaid shift, that of assets shifting to a asset wealthy ‘rentier’ elite, while everyone else shifts towards a poor assetless renter. While house prices are rising in most areas in the UK (except Scotland), buy to let is also booming:
Richard Dyson in the Telegraph:
:blink:
Putting two and two together and making minus three point seven, I’d say that those ‘rich’ people looking for returns on their cash are piling into BTL (or maybe they just wanted a BLT? – that’s a Bacon, Lettuce and tomato sandwich, a delicacy of UK cuisine :lol:) with the great rates, gov’t subsidies (!) on offer and rents going through the roof what’s not to like? Everyone needs a roof over their head don’t they ‘guv? Shed with a bed anyone? :huh:
From the ‘beeb’:
Check out the video for a ‘modern day shack’:
https://emp.bbci.co.uk/emp/releases/worldwide/revisions/749603_749269_749444_6/749603_749269_749444_6_emp.swf27 February 2012 Last updated at 19:03. Chris Rogers investigates:
A series of modern day British slums have been described as “sheds with beds”.
The illegal structures, some dangerous and cramped, are offered by landlords – often to Britain’s illegal immigrants.
Many occupants send money back to their families in India, paying thousands of pounds to traffickers. But the economic downturn means work has dried up.
As they point out in the film, with rents of £800 a month for a shed, its one way to pay the mortgage… :dry:
L,
Sid.Hi Dave, Nassim,
Another factor often missed, besides the fact that ‘price increase’ does not equal ‘inflation’ in the technical economic term of increasing monetary supply, is the ‘profiteering’ (as opposed to the ‘profit problem’) by companies especially ‘middle men’ such as the giant ‘food chain’ supermarkets, who up their prices to offset declining spending by their customers. This heavily distorts the deflation picture and coupled with the increase in energy prices due to the exhaustion of the easy to get ‘cheap’ stuff (its more expensive to extract and so more expensive to end customer) leads to increasing costs of production and ultimately prices regardless of speculation (as discussed here just short while ago). This is why it is so deadly to clear understanding when ‘price increase’ is conflated with ‘inflation’. Today’s price increases have nothing to do with an increasing money supply but everything to do with increasing energy cost, market manipulation and profiteering. But your average dumbed down Jo is only interested in ‘strictly come bake off’ and accepts the terms the ‘good news’ people provide that price inflation is a fact of life and prices always go up, unlike their wages which can go down as well as up. But then sheep apparently like to be fleeced… :dry:
As regards medical and educational establishments, there is also the ‘demographic’ shifts of increasing medical hyper-complexity and a general systems creep in all things medical where the system has become its own raison d’etre. And in ‘education’ where degree inflation (the factual lowering of standards and general dumbing down) and the demographic shift upwards of age of entry into the work place due to an increasing population living longer coupled with fewer ‘manual labour’ jobs being available disguised as a policy of ‘betterment’ by having more [strike]people[/strike] sheep being fattened on debt before they even start earning is the main ‘raison’ for the huge increase in ‘higher’ education. Ultimately its all symptomatic of a sclerotic system on the verge of collapse… though the way things are going it could grind on on life support for decades. :unsure:
L,
Sid.The price of a Big Mac, for instance, has risen faster than the official rise in consumer prices and has been doing so since the late ’90s. In 1998, the average price of a Big Mac was about $2.50. Today, the average Big Mac is $4.56. If we were using the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the price of a Big Mac today should be about $3.40.
Oh no – not ‘burgernomics’… :sick:
I mean c’mon, it shows the level of analysis that has been stooped to when this initially ‘jokey’ comparison was made back in the 1980s:
Talk about empirical hegemony – let them eat BMs… The analysis is more full of holes than a mad cows brains. Y’know like the ‘local’ costs of beef production/shipping beef patties half way round the world, the ‘local’ costs (or not – zero hours contracts etc) of labour, flour cooking energy gas electric or dried cow dung yet alone if the locals want to eat this sh*t in the first place. Its the ultimate farce analysis of the whole ‘globalisation project’:
One [strike]Ring[/strike] burger to rule them all, One [strike]Ring[/strike] burger to find them, One [strike]Ring[/strike] burger to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
Wolf nipple chips anyone?:
[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrDVsprWRCQ[/video]
Bag of otters noses! 😆
L,
Sid.Ilargi
Maybe its spinning the sheep to get the fleece nice’n’dry before they shear it right off! As regards Syria, anecdotal evidence (some one who recently flew out of a Greek island with a US base) said there was ‘a lot’ of military activity – so much so their flight was slightly delayed waiting for ‘the military’ to clear the runway/airspace. Go figure… :unsure:
Also the ‘cash supply’ outside of the states looks pretty healthy according to ZH: The Rise Of The C-Note “And” The Cashless Economy?…
“printing $350 billion worth over the last 12 months to meet anticipated robust worldwide demand. “
Whereas in the US itself its strictly cash-less:
Which equates to $cash inflation on the outside, $cash deflation on the inside… go figure again… :huh:
L,
Sid.Hi Ilargi,
And since government debt is far more secure that corporate debt, it’s hard to see how the former would stop borrowing before the latter (unless these borrow straight from the government). Governments have millions of people who can pay off the debt sometime in the future.
Unless the gov’t decides to shut down and play the ‘oh no we’re gonna default’ card… :unsure: Or… from Kyle Bass in the 1st vid here:
…all the money your gonna have is under the pillow
!!!
Talk about a freak show – is it just a distraction to hide the shouts of [strike]the emperor has no clothes[/strike] look at the new suit – this one will taper for ever???… :dry:
L,
Sid.Hi Folks,
I think the best bit was this from the ‘[strike]Son[/strike] Clone of Thatcher’:
“The mortgage market today isn’t working,” Cameron said [..] . “There’s a market failure going on which the government is helping correct.”
So your saying that the ‘free market’ doesn’t work and that ‘gov’t ‘ has to step in and help it? 😆
Talk about a myth eating its own tale… I wonder if this is how the Aztecs went down after sacrificing all those people and things to Huitzilopochtli. After all it was considered a form of debt payment, according to ‘Wiki’:
While not the most reliable of sources, I thought it too ironic to miss… :dry:
This is the nature of corruption and how systems fail. As if to prove a point, a Monsanto executive and the founder of Syngenta are to receive Nobel prizes of agriculture, for a ‘technology’ that impoverishes farmers by making them buy the seeds and chemicals every year, and poisons the land and water with those same chemicals. I guess this is the icing on the ‘legitimisation’ cake which Ilargi talked about earlier in this article: Time To Stop Monsanto And The US Supreme Court.
You can protest to stop it here:
Here’s the url if you want to tell others: https://action.sumofus.org/a/world-food-prize-monsanto-syngenta/?sub=mtle
L,
Sid.Hi V81,
Thanks for that garbage.
Sorry, usually enjoy your posts but I had the misfortune of watching that interview on The Economic Collapse blog yesterday and I don’t fancy another go. Its not that I disagree with her on everything she says – its that I don’t know what she is blathering on about half the time so cannot make an informed decision to agree or disagree with her. You’d really think a World Bank lawyer would be at least a little bit succinct in explaining herself and/or her argument…
Yes I know… Sorry, should have added /sarc at the bottom of that! I guess it does show one thing – if she is wanting to be considered sane, how mad are the other lot and what’s going on in their heads?
But it does raise some serious points about just what are the options going forward? Forget about the Roman/Aztec/Khmer empires – no one to my knowledge has ever lived through a total global collapse of a technological society. There are so many log-jams of hyper complexity out there just waiting for a chance cluster…
but have to wonder at what point all the intellectuals who frequent TAE will decide to cut their losses in terms of workable solutions and start preparing for the fact they may have an inevitable fight on their hands for the simple privilege of survival. Not because their ideas aren’t sound or appreciated by other TAE’ers, but because most of the people are terminally dependent on our current operating system and thus have already plotted our course to disaster, setting the system to ‘autopilot’…
When it goes down it will most probably not be pretty given the vagaries of human nature, especially in the supposedly more developed ‘first world’. Elsewhere it will probably just be another day for most people – maybe it will get a whole lot easier without first worlders telling them what to do all the time. One can conjure up any number of scenarios as the Hollywood fantasy shop amongst others has shown over the years not to mention the doomster blogosphere. :dry:
L,
Sid.Hi Folks,
Any and all public treasures are fair game in today’s societies, and unless we find ourselves a large group of politicians and judges that cannot be bought, everything will end up being sold to the highest bidder.
.
B-b-b-but isn’t that the point of a ‘free market economy’???
Its all a big club, and you ain’t in it! From the horses mouth (ex-world bank lawyer) ‘pensions to pay pennies on dollar – we was robbed’, ‘time to stand up and say enough is enough’ etc:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owanSt6XnmM
Not quite sure how everyone suddenly getting ‘wealthy’ will solve anything now though… :dry:
L,
sid.Hi Ilargi,
James Kunstler has just recently done a podcast with Richard Heinberg about his new book, Snake Oil: How Fracking’s False Promises of Plenty Imperils Our Future. It raises the issue that current gas prices are too low to sustain the cost of fracking so any claims about ‘fracking’ reducing the cost of gas is a non-sequitur, as prices need to rise to make it even possible – which I think is what you have been saying all along on TAE.
Great call on the Clash btw. :cheer:
L,
Sid.Hi Folks,
Cameron had better be careful – if they were to start fracking in his back yard, he might get booted out as locals in frack threatened Balcome, normally a conservative heartland, have said they will look else where come the next election. Though a recent poll suggests that opinion is actually split fairly evenly.
However, the biggest opposition is surprisingly not going to be public but corporate – the Uk water companies through the industry group Water UK have challenged the energy industry over safety claims. This is especially prevalent in the UK where water companies annually extract 2,135 million cubic metres of water from the ground and many private householders extract less than 20 cubic a day as you don’t need a licence for less then this amount.
Looks like the PM has signed his own political death warrant – or maybe he knows something we don’t… :dry:
L,
Sid.???
Yes I know all about that and have commented upon it before. Immigration legal or otherwise is a ruse by TPTB to grow the ‘economy’ through population growth by trying to avoid the demographic shift of ‘developed’ industrial economies. Cameron’s recent visit to India was almost an open invite. Its the ‘growth at any cost’ + slave labour (by flooding the market and slashing wage cost) mentality. But I was not talking about immigration (which you seem to think is a bad thing despite being an emigre yourself???)
My ‘argument’ for a global citizens income/living wage would IMHO reverse this trend and help sustainable development around the world as has been shown in the examples and would also take pressure off population growth – a main driver of mass migration – by giving women equal access to a share of the worlds wealth. But this won’t happen with the current psychos in charge who are fixated upon accumulating ever more for themselves.
We really need to install a ‘new operating system’ before this defunct and decrepit old one boots us all off the planet, rich and poor alike. While a citizens income is no panacea, it offers the potential to stabilise the velocity of money, and also enable smaller more dynamic communities especially if accompanied by land reform. We need to ‘garden’ the earth and restore the environment using tools such as Allen Savory’s holistic land management and the teachings of Robert Hart, Masanobu Fukuoka and Sepp Holzer. With a mass return to the land in an equitable way we might just stand a chance… BAU and we stand no chance at all.:dry:
L,
Sid.Hi Nassim,
I’m sorry I just don’t get the point you are trying to make. I was talking about a fair an equitable distribution of ‘wealth’ that has been proven to stabilise unstable societies as it is well documented that inequality destroys social order quicker than a despot on crack. People tend to emigrate mostly when desperate and for economic reasons – they cannot afford to live where they are. Besides aren’t you in Oz? Were you born there? :unsure:
L,
Sid.Hi Nassim,
Not sure of your logic:
“I suspect it would be a fantastic magnet for people from poorer countries. “
Who by default would not be ‘citizens’. If it was rolled out globally in every country, perhaps they would have more incentive to stay put and improve their lives and their own locality where they are. After all, all the ‘citizens income’ guarantees is the ability to able to afford to live – a fair share of ‘wealth’.
One of the recurring ideas that crops up in alternative economics circles is the citizen’s income. In a nutshell, it’s a universal and unconditional payment made to every adult in the country, every month. This provides everyone with a ‘guaranteed minimum income’, which is an alternative name for it.
We have it in a form in the UK already, through child benefit payments. A full scale citizens income would include adults too, with different rates for different stages of life. Everyone would receive it, and it would replace child benefit, state pensions, unemployment benefits and a host of other tax credits.
Reactions to this idea generally divide in two. The first group is ‘brilliant – free money from the government’. The second comes from those who think about it a moment longer and realise that it would be funded through taxes. Then they ask why you’d want to give benefits to rich people as well as poor people.
A fair question, but there is some sensible thinking behind the idea of the citizens income that makes it more than the national pocket-money scheme it appears at first glance. It’s also one of those ideas that has been advocated by politicians and economists from right across the spectrum. It’s been a recurring policy in the Green Party, but free-marketer Milton Friedman was a fan too. Martin Luther King called for it. So did Napoleon. It was discussed by the Labour Party in Britain in the 50s, and by the Republican Party in the US in the 60s. Bertrand Russell wrote that it allowed society to enjoy the best of anarchism and socialism at the same time, as part of a largely forgotten libertarian socialism movement. There aren’t many ideas that can cross these sorts of ideological boundaries so freely, and when you find one it’s well worth investigating it a little further.
Also:
An example of a ‘mini-basic income’ is the Permanent Fund Dividend which in an annual individual payout to Alaskans. Though the payout is relatively small and only annually distributed, it still goes to show that this kind of program is being used today: https://pfd.alaska.gov
Research from Namibia revealed that the introduction of a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) led to an increase in economic activity which contradicts critics’ claims that the BIG will lead to laziness and dependency. Learn more about it here: https://bignam.org
Namibia had amazing results in a number of other things as well, namely poverty reduction, which is a pivotal point in and of itself, and a reduction in crime rate by 40%. Now, imagine what a global basic income guarantee could do.
But like I said it won;t happen – its too fair and compassionate for ‘psychopaths’:
From the Guardian
‘If the middle are being squeezed, the poor are being starved’
Look beyond the headline figures at the values underpinning housing policy and its impact on tenants
(bold added)
The psychopaths in control have no concern other than for themselves:
psy·cho·path
/ˈsīkəˌpaTH/
Noun
A person suffering from chronic mental disorder with abnormal or violent social behavior.
Synonyms
psychoSo are you feeling squeezed or starving? :dry:
L,
Sid.Hi Nassim,
No, it means 1. being p***ed off about something, or 2. reporting bad behaviour i.e. ‘telling on someone’ – its a slang word. See: urban dictionary here.
As for thinngs getting unpleasant, they already are incredibly unpleasant for many people in these sceptered isles, its just not reported in msm. Large parts of the country have been struggling with basics since the eighties and the loss of the industrial base. The number of people turning to food banks since the start of the school holidays is alarming:
Trust running country’s largest network says some branches have had double the number of requests for emergency parcels since start of school holidays
Not long now before all hell breaks lose and they start detaining people in ‘work camps’ – “arbeit macht frei” n’est pas?
There has never been a better time for a ‘Citizens income’ – but the behaviour of the elite will never allow it – its too compasionate and fair… :dry:
L,
Sid.Admin- is it just all my machines or has the ‘boardcode’ stopped working??? I’m having to type in the smilies 🙁
Hi Ilargi,
Of the $1 quadrillion+ in derivatives out there, at least half are interest rate swaps. Rising interest rates will cause massive deleveraging in the field.
Which is probably the real reason the the new Bank of England Governor is linking the interest rate rises to when unemployment levels fall below 7% – clever man – he knows that ain’t gonna happen (2 million being taken off the sick benefit – where are they gonna find work?) – so interest will perpetually remain at effective zero rate for the foreseeable future… :huh:
Meanwhile house prices leap ever upwards, and the gov’t moots plans to cancel the mortgage support scheme before it even starts (in 2014). :silly:
Now what was that analogy of something very fast meeting something very big and solid?… :dry:
L,
Sid.HI Ken,
Yeah, to paraphrase a theme used here recently, its like they bought the worst horse in the glue factory and are now trying to make it look like a thoroughbred – and when the young lad by the side of the road points out that its legs aren’t moving and its on wheels, they’ll creatively “write everything off in “masterful” ways, so the hurt is limited” as Ilargi pointed out above.
Welcome to the new normal as they say… :dry:
L,
Sid.Hi Ken,
Its more likely to be $8-16 capital per bbl over the life time given the 500,000 to 900,000 bbls per well quoted above… given ongoing maitenace adn transport costs they reckon cost price comes in at about $90.
Again from ‘Oil and Gas Investments’:
That’s a huge upfront cost. Each well produces approximately 615,000 barrels of oil, meaning the breakeven price for each Bakken well ends up in the $70-$90/barrel range, once taxes, royalties, and expenses are included. If oil prices slump below that level, a lot of people say Bakken wells aren’t worth the cost.
As the wells in the Bakken grow closer together, initial production rates are sliding. According to some sets of data, average first year well output climbed steadily from 2005 to a peak in mid-2010, then declined almost 25% over the following 12 months.
With more wells tapping into the same resources, there is simply less oil pressure available to each well. And when initial well output starts to fall, an accelerating number of new wells must be brought online to sustain overall production volumes.
Energy independence yeah – for a day maybe… 😆
L,
Sid.
