< checks notes for a list of things to buy >

“Ok guys, I’m ordering one time machine to go back to a stable period of earth’s history.”

And they are fake flowers.

Never forget.

A generation back the auto workers unions decided to invest the pension funds in the auto companies.

That cheap financing paid for the auto manufacturers to afford to close the unionized plants and move them to Mexico. Byeeeee! Enjoy your unemployment!

After four fall-offs, the process usually comes to a halt on its own?

I have a pet theory that the “money” is being siphoned from peoples’ retirement accounts.

They deregulated multiple safeguards against market concentration risk. Result that corporations have converted working people’s “safe” diversified retirement savings into growth-chasing “pick a winner” stock bets. For example, a 401K account can (now) be like 20%+ invested in a single company like Microsoft or Nvidia.

Then using accounting shenanigans, the AI hype and lots of other trickery certain tech stocks juiced their growth just as the brakes came off and they have sucked an ungodly amount of wealth out of the normal economy.

This is an epic (real) wealth transfer beyond anything I’ve seen or imagined.

If there is a rug pull, the billionaire safety bunkers will make sense.

This “market” exposure will wipe out the investor class also. This is the enshittification of the stock market.

The immediate impact of the “iran war” is not simply in fossil energy, but also on a huge range of fossil fuel byproducts on which AI and many other industries depend. The global economy is still very much a fossil fuel economy, and AI is locking us even further into it.

I was thinking about how if there is any silver lining to the conflict, its that it deobfuscates some of the complex links in modern supply chains and it also makes salient how even some of the techno-optimist environmental and technical solutions are all underpinned by non-renewing energy and material resources…

he means they are going to keep raising the price of oil until it’s so expensive you don’t buy it anymore. They’re going to keep raising prices until you no longer even consider buying it.

Usually this means people will need to lose their jobs, therefore stop driving to work and have no money to go out or do anything.

So money broke physics?

Wine consultant Leon Deans said distillation could be a viable option to remove the oversupply, but may require government support because the cost of distilling the wine could be higher than the revenue from the ethanol.

If you consider that:

• cost of distilling bakes in the thermodynamic and energy costs of raising the temperatures of the wine to separate the alcohol
• the price for the pure alcohol is fungible with the market price of any other liquid fuel or alcohol on a per-energy equivalence

This seems like it’s a net energy negative process where the total amount of energy available to the society drops where you do this. This is exactly why it loses money.

Basically:

• you buy some energy some place
• wine producers take product they already made that has no market value and use the energy input to make something they can sell, using up that original energy
• the energy coming out is lower than what you started with in step 1, but you sell the energy for less money
• this loses energy AND money, but the government subsidies make the money side not a problem

This cuts wine makers in on the deal in a way where the market makes this feasible despite the underlying thermodynamic losses.

NOTE: the grapes and wine that were originally grown, the harvesting, bottling etc also have thermodynamic and material costs that are totally external to this analysis. The farm itself bought fuel when it made the wine, that’s all not ibcluddd into the ethanol calculus. When you consider the total investment with a wider boundary you can start to cost many additional resources like time, water, wages, insurance, financial interest and on and on.

• Comaps for driving / street navigation
• Caltopo for backcountry navigation (has offline maps)
• Trailforks for public recreation trails (hiking, mountain travel, mountain bike)
• Relief Maps for 3D landscape visualization / viewing

The LtG showed that if 1972 population had frozen at that level, there was STILL eventually a crash within a few hundred years.

And they also carefully stated that if you grew population from 1972 to 1990 and then had no further population growth (same idea starting 20 years late), the crash was before 2100. The window for any kind of sustainable population control would have already closed within the next 20 years.

What you’re outlining is a scenario where let’s say it’s roughly approximate to growing population from 1972 to 2022, then DECREASING population growth. Let’s say if we could snap our fingers and put today’s population of 8.3B to 1990s level of 5.3B, well we can already interpolate from the LtG that this doesn’t get us to 2100, they already spelled that out.

You need the following : Population rapidly back to 1990 or 1972 levels, double/unlimited resources, pollution controls, increased agriculture etc. Like basically every variable beyond all the most unrealistic scenarios they modelled.

You’re saying “there is a solution” but I think basically a lot of people would technically need to die somehow, given where we are in this story. So just ethically, no, there isn’t a solution.

The “voluntarily reduced population” was what they called “perfect birth control”. They showed that this led to a crash also. To really halt population growth into a “steady state” you need to place a strict license on reproduction to get zero growth, like an imposed law or whatever.

In the paper LtG 30yr recalibration, the model is validated against historical data and basically they say that the boundary in the original model was running out of resources, but in the revised model it’s pollution, but the limits are still in force. Almost all the other variables are in line to the original model. Resources and pollution are the main difference from the 1972 study, and they diverge in opposite directions and basically cancel the effect of the change in the other, so there is no change to the overall summed together story.

In a bee hive, many of the bees are sterile drone workers that don’t reproduce because the queen is laying clones that are even more related than their own direct offspring would be. So the drone workers genes are being better reproduced by the super organism.

Individual humans share 99.9% of genes in perfect overlap across all humanity. Therefore our genes don’t care about any individual human survival, the push is for growth at a community scale, anywhere. This is a situation with a profoundly different evolutionary drive than anything that Darwin cooked up. For human genetic evolution to occur, how would you drive it without operating that at a network level?

Places like Cuba and Haiti are a natural experiment in what life would look like without industrial agriculture inputs. They are basically producing food on organic small scale agriculture by hand.

Fun fact: Britain has around the same per capita agricultural area as Haiti does, only Britain is using fertilizer and in addition importing 50% of the food sold (almost like importing double the farm area). This amount of fertilizer costs less than 1/40,000th of Britain’s annual GDP.

• Standard run (business as usual) population crash around 2050.
• Doubled resources population crash around 2050.
• Unlimited resources population crash around 2050.
• Unlimited resources and pollution control population sharp decline 2075.
• Unlimited resources, pollution control and increased agriculture population crash around 2050.
• Unlimited resources, pollution control, increased agriculture and perfect birth control population crash around 2090.
• Stabilized earth (no population growth, no economic growth) crash after centuries. [* if you start in 1972. By 1990 it’s too late.]

In general, it seems like LtG scenarios show that more resources or more technology just push population level higher before hitting a crash. And as you point out, the crash is worse (steeper and more severe) the more resources and technology went on and the bigger the population at the point of collapse.

In a way you could analyze LtG as saying that overpopulation is the central issue and there is no solution set to solve population overshoot.

The 1972 Limits to Growth study famously made many of the same exact points. Their computer model projected different scenarios, and none of them didn’t eventually have a crash. They showed that business as usual and lots of population growth would lead to a very abrupt cliff / die-off and they also showed that a much more restrained population growth could continue for hundreds of years in an almost economic steady state.

The backlash from economists was that all the previous claims of a hard civilization limit had been successfully transcended and that models were too complicated to understand and the plan would be downright lousy for the economy. Therefore it wasn’t a problem, or if it was we shouldn’t do anything about it.

If the LtG was correct and the economists were wrong about innovating our way out of a collapse, I hope we have airbags installed in this thing.

The popular understanding of Malthus was that he was calling for a population crash / overshoot.

I think he was saying a more nuanced thing. What he said was that any material improvements that raise the standard of living will be responded to with human population growth and that the growth always increases population until humans are living in miserable conditions again.

He was claiming that technology cannot solve this issue, human behavior sabotages the technical advances. Every technological step that could lead towards a human utopia will be overwhelmed by population and progress was sort of paradoxically impossible.

This is very similar to Jevons who said that resource efficiency causes it to be cheaper to use that resource so humans will use more, not less, as efficiency advances, so technology steps backwards, not forward.

At some point you would expect 2X imbalance to be 2X temperature change rate. The climate system has all kinds of hysteresis, but eventually the system has to find a new setpoint and jump to it.

About a year ago I did a deep dive on some of the economic aspects of the logging industry. There is a major study on the USA industry put out by the USDA.

What I was going to mention was that logging had a particular situation where credit was pretty cheap at a moment in time, so big expensive machines were basically the way to go.

Most logging companies went into debt buying logging machines, trucks etc and it was all managing well until FUEL became more expensive. The cost of running the machines essentially squeezed all the profits out of the business and a lot of companies were basically just squeaking by and paying loans and not much else. I think the entire usa had only about $1B in total industry profits.

This report came out BEFORE diesel doubled in price. It’s going to be like the fertilizer / farming thing where the costs of energy will absolutely cripple the industrial Timber businesses also. They could raise prices and pass along the costs only if consumers have the ability to pay.

I think it’s likely that the marginal timber companies will simply fold. Timber sales that have too great a hauling distance to a mill will just be uneconomic.

If there are shortages of both diesel and fertilizer (and costs go up), it’s hard to imagine this won’t spike food prices.

But if both inputs are not JUST expensive, but unobtainable, it’s a worse problem than prices.