Mark Blyth, the economist who's making sense

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ttystikk said:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170418-how-western-civilisation-could-collapse

The coming collapse of civilisation, what's driving it and what could be done to slow or even reverse it.
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Very ingeresting article. I read the whole thing.

I believe the collapse of civilization has already begun. Early last century.

Rome took a couple hundreds to completely fall apart. Our civilization will likely take longer. But i have no doubt it had started. With the 1st world war...
 
Gquebed said:
Very ingeresting article. I read the whole thing.

I believe the collapse of civilization has already begun. Early last century.

Rome took a couple hundreds to completely fall apart. Our civilization will likely take longer. But i have no doubt it had started. With the 1st world war...
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It's going to get a lot worse, soon. The end of oil is coming sooner rather than later;

https://medium.com/@GeeeBee/looking-down-the-barrel-the-tooth-fairy-the-dragon-king-9225dfb4cc6a
 
Gquebed said:
What?
Who the fuck said that?

I said people think that USSRs war in afghanistan caused the USSR to go broke. Which is wrong. Inefficiency and corruption caused the financial collapse of the communist economic system decades before they invaded afghanistan. The same thing happened in each republic, one by one...

They were bankrupt a long time before they invaded afghanistan.

But that wasnt my point.
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You said that.
Gquebed said:
It is believed that Communism crashed and burned economically in the late 80s, after their debacle in afghanistan, but really... that is merely when people found out that Communism had collapsed. In fact, the Soviet Union was broke a couple decades before.

Same thing with capitalism. Everbody thinks 2008 is when capitalsim caved in on itself, but in fact it failed a couple decades before.

2008 was just an after death convulsion. There may be a couple more yet before rigor mortis sets in on capitalism. But make no mistake... it is dead and has been for a while.
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Right here ^^^. Your statement seems as if you are saying that the economic system of Communism crashed and burned because of the Afghanistan invasion. Don't get pissy at me because your thoughts are a mess. For somebody with strong ties to the FSU, you don't really seem to understand a lot. Oh well.
 
Gquebed said:
I dont think anything demonstrates the end of oil more clearly than when people go so far as to suck it out of rocks...that are buried deep underground....lol
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And yet the oil is being sucked out of rocks exceptionally cheaply. New technology has allowed this to happen but it certainly is not evidence that oil is growing in importance. If we were spending a fortune to get that oil out of rocks, you might have a point. But we aren't. Not only that, but the new technology makes marginal oil land much more productive. There is a lot of it.

Where were you "educated"? I had always thought that one of the few benefits of the FSU was a decent educational system.
 
Gquebed said:
Very ingeresting article. I read the whole thing.

I believe the collapse of civilization has already begun. Early last century.

Rome took a couple hundreds to completely fall apart. Our civilization will likely take longer. But i have no doubt it had started. With the 1st world war...
Click to expand...
Interesting how the article mentions increased wealth and income inequality as a fundamental cause of societal collapse- but then doesn't explore it further.

No one needs a billion dollars. Not even $10 million. The idea that we allow such people to not only exist without taxing them to repay the contribution society made to their wealth- but in fact to go the other way and enslave society to them is the golden paved road to ruin that history shows us has been travelled time and again by failed civilisations that came before us.

Getting money out of politics is absolutely the greatest existential crisis of modern times. If we fail at this, our children will suffer and their children will die.

Now ask me about oil... LOL
 
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Unclebaldrick said:
You said that.

Right here ^^^. Your statement seems as if you are saying that the economic system of Communism crashed and burned because of the Afghanistan invasion. Don't get pissy at me because your thoughts are a mess. For somebody with strong ties to the FSU, you don't really seem to understand a lot. Oh well.
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He said very clearly that Afghanistan wasn't the root cause of Russian communism's collapse, it was the final straw.
 
Unclebaldrick said:
And yet the oil is being sucked out of rocks exceptionally cheaply. New technology has allowed this to happen but it certainly is not evidence that oil is growing in importance. If we were spending a fortune to get that oil out of rocks, you might have a point. But we aren't. Not only that, but the new technology makes marginal oil land much more productive. There is a lot of it.

Where were you "educated"? I had always thought that one of the few benefits of the FSU was a decent educational system.
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Tight oil from shale, gas or tar is not, will not and can not replace cheap oil.

https://medium.com/@GeeeBee/looking-down-the-barrel-the-tooth-fairy-the-dragon-king-9225dfb4cc6a

This is a long read, but well worth your time.

Fun fact from the article above; 60% of the world's oil is coming from just 1% of the oil fields, and those aptly named giant fields are showing strong signs of depletion. The Earth is finite and there are no replacements for them. Of this we can be sure; we've spent half a century looking.
 
Unclebaldrick said:
You said that.

Right here ^^^. Your statement seems as if you are saying that the economic system of Communism crashed and burned because of the Afghanistan invasion. Don't get pissy at me because your thoughts are a mess. For somebody with strong ties to the FSU, you don't really seem to understand a lot. Oh well.
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Naw. You just cant read.
 
Unclebaldrick said:
And yet the oil is being sucked out of rocks exceptionally cheaply. New technology has allowed this to happen but it certainly is not evidence that oil is growing in importance. If we were spending a fortune to get that oil out of rocks, you might have a point. But we aren't. Not only that, but the new technology makes marginal oil land much more productive. There is a lot of it.

Where were you "educated"? I had always thought that one of the few benefits of the FSU was a decent educational system.
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Wrong again.
I live in frack country. The city i live in is built on oil. Fracking is far from cheap. New tech has made it cheaper, but that doesnt mean its cheap.
 
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ttystikk said:
Tight oil from shale, gas or tar is not, will not and can not replace cheap oil.

https://medium.com/@GeeeBee/looking-down-the-barrel-the-tooth-fairy-the-dragon-king-9225dfb4cc6a

This is a long read, but well worth your time.

Fun fact from the article above; 60% of the world's oil is coming from just 1% of the oil fields, and those aptly named giant fields are showing strong signs of depletion. The Earth is finite and there are no replacements for them. Of this we can be sure; we've spent half a century looking.
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I live just south of the tar sands in Alberta. The oil reserves there are immense and there is far more of it in Sask. But the process of extracting oil from the bitumen is expensive, infrastructure intensive... its desperation... as is deep water drilling, whether in the carribean, atlantic or arctic.

Sucking oil out of rocks is far past desperation... lol
 
Gquebed said:
Wrong again.
I live in frack country. The city i live in is built on oil. Fracking is far from cheap. New tech has made it cheaper, but that doesnt mean its cheap.
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Cheaper than coal, but it's not a good feedstock for liquid transportation fuel due to costs of conversion.

I wonder what the natural gas tank on a container ship would look like- and how far away you'd have to be to survive the blast if it failed? LOL
 
Gquebed said:
I live just south of the tar sands in Alberta. The oil reserves there are immense and there is far more of it in Sask. But the process of extracting oil from the bitumen is expensive, infrastructure intensive... its desperation... as is deep water drilling, whether in the carribean, atlantic or arctic.

Sucking oil out of rocks is far past desperation... lol
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The long read in the post you quoted was quite an education for me. I agree, but just like Scrylok, what happens if we just stop?

We need something else. What that will be isn't apparent as yet. Solar on every rooftop? Enough wind turbines to fly Siberia? There isn't enough lithium in the world for all the batteries we will need...
 
Unclebaldrick said:
Oh my. You are quite a piece of work.
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He might be being a dick to you, but in this case he's right.

The long read I posted above is extremely informative. Worse, there isn't a limitless supply of fossil fuel sourced gas any more than there is for oil.

To give you an idea of how much of a desperation play the tar sands really are, consider the fact that for every barrel of oil shipped out of Alberta, at least 19 more barrels' worth were burned. That is among the highest energy production multiples in the history of the industry, which in fact is itself terminally plagued with rising costs of production.

Every barrel requires a larger and larger percentage of itself to be used in its production, leaving ever less for the global industrialized world.
 
ttystikk said:
The long read in the post you quoted was quite an education for me. I agree, but just like Scrylok, what happens if we just stop?

We need something else. What that will be isn't apparent as yet. Solar on every rooftop? Enough wind turbines to fly Siberia? There isn't enough lithium in the world for all the batteries we will need...
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No doubt we need something else. But what? Nothing gets the same energy bang for your buck. This is the root of the problem.

Solar aint it. Not without some incredible advancements in the tech. And i mean incredible. Wind farms have proven to be the flop that they promised to be.
Tidal turbines maybe? I dont know...

What about harnessing the energy from gravity? Somebody working on that?
 
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