I am not excited about any of these changes unfortunately, they are somewhat specialized, though having synchronous replication and serializable transaction isolation sounds more useful than other stuff.
But there are real things that are missing. Most obvious is distributing of one SQL request into parallel processes or threads to speed up query execution on multi-core systems (which are all multi-core today). The other is the entire issue of attempting to calculate execution time and failing in various cases in the planner, like the really sad cases of completely mis-handling of the mergejoin estimates, which then forces people to set enable_mergejoin to false unfortunately, it's a sledgehammer approach, but otherwise things that can execute in a few milliseconds can take tens of seconds and even minutes instead.
There are so many ways to improve performance and really kick it up, and instead there are more features added. I think database performance is now more important for PostgreSQL than features (unless this means introducing parallelization of single SQL requests.)
Otherwise it's a good database, it already provides tons of features. The one weird thing that I find though, is that for replication or hot stand by or just for creating a dynamic backup, the segments that are written to the disk are always of fixed size.
You can modify the size, which is 16MB by default, but you can only modify the size when you configure the source code before compiling it: configure --with-wal-segsize=1 - this configures the segments to 1MB, which allows the second drive to last that much longer if all you are doing is using a second drive to keep dynamic backup (and that asynchronous backup method, by the way, the problem that they are solving with "synchronous replication", it's that you either have these segments fill up, and then the segment is written to disk, or you wait until time expires for segment to be written to disk if you set checkpoint_timeout). I imagine treating fixed sized segments is easier than generating segments that are of exact size equal to amount of data that was produced in a time period, but it's a waste of disk though.
The other big thing that I would love to have in a database is ability to scale the database to multiple machines, so have a logical database span multiple disks on multiple machines, have multiple postgres processes running against those multiple disks, but have it all as one scalable database in a way that's transparent to the application. That would be some sort of a breakthrough (SAN or not).
Of-course songs are indestructible, so maybe children of the children's children will have those without copyright? No, of-course not, by that time the copyrights will be for 500 years or the combine lifespan of all 'authors' relatives, whichever is bigger.
We just had this story "Fukushima and Chernobyl Side-by-Side", and I stand by idea that there needs to be less state, more private enterprise involved in this, because there needs to be research approaching the entire question differently - how is energy extracted from nuclear materials?
In that thread there are so many people talking how much better State ran nuclear power plants are, though Chernobyl was State ran.
Yes, France has lots of nuclear power plants. Yes, they are relatively safe. No, it doesn't mean they won't have a problem. No, it doesn't mean private plants must have problems.
Sure, State can spend more money on everything, every back up possible, but that's because the State forces everybody in the state to pay up or borrows the cash from others, or prints it.
Again: how about allowing private enterprise get more involved in research and design, because I really want a nuclear powered skateboard.
In both comments, yours above, and mine there is reference to shooting stuff. So is it possible I may be onto something when I say xml makes people angrier and more violent?
The more xml I see the more I want to shoot something.
We are going in a weird direction, I am not saying it's right or wrong, but it's weirdly unpleasant and doesn't add simplicity to development, though of-course it depends what kind of development this is compared to. But I swear, the more levels of indirection is added with everything that cannot be simply executed in a debugger, the harder it's becoming to figure out what's happening quickly.
The point is that it seems to me that all these tools with multiple levels of indirection are aimed at more and more specialization, which may be fine with infinite resources on projects, but it's probably not fine in economic times, when fewer people are expected to handle more stuff.
As an atheist, I am with you on one thing: fuck religion.
But also:
Yeah! Fuck religion of starting unconstitutional wars, building an unconstitutional empire, unconstitutionally taking down democratic governments, engaging in entangling alliances, spending money on all sides, using the pretense of "fighting for freedoms", while actually stealing money in all sorts of wars, conflicts and redistributing the wealth from citizens of all countries towards some chosen military/para military and other monopolies.
The crazy thing is, I would expect anybody who thinks that way to be an Apple zealot in the first place.
- I don't understand, why? I don't own any Apple products and I don't subscribe to the collective mentality (to say the least), but why do you think that Apple lovers are also these highly social butterflies? I know some people who use those products but they are nothing like that.
Government isn't there to protect you against other citizens.
Federal government has a mandate - border protection and protection of liberties and property and enforcement of contract.
All other functions are your local issues.
FEMA is correctly identified as an inefficient moral hazard, and it should be disbanded, and to pay for all sorts of disaster the States should have their own money left to them, and not stolen by the federal system, and then crumbs redistributed back, after most of it goes towards wars and government preferred monopolies and banks.
As I go through Heathrow, and see the blokes casually holding Heckler & Koch G36 with fingertips on the triggers, in Zurich I notice security with MP5s and in Frankfurt and Karlsruhe I see cops with Heckler & Koch 9 mm, and I have to take the shoes off, be searched, my luggage not only x-rayed, but also dusted for explosives, and then I see cops with AK47 all over Pulkovo, I will try to remember your comments here, thinking that maybe this does constitute a 'decent place', but it does make me quite uncomfortable, because they are all armed at all those places and I am not allowed.
No, corporate profits for well connected monopolies is way up due to the fiscal policy that creates this imbalance, which is basically currency destruction and thus prevention of any sort of investment opportunity, and the confused masses are searching for the solutions in all the wrong places, while government comes out with bogus ideas on job creation.
This should be a day of mourning, not just because of the people who died (one of my managers at the time, Vladimir Tomasevic, I am lucky not to have been there too), but it's a day of mourning for the liberties and freedoms lost across USA but also across the entire freaking world. The entire world today looks more and more like a crazy toon town, with cops with machine guns everywhere, insane laws, TSA, just general loss of privacy, liberty, decency, everything, and this should also include the economic calamity that obviously worsened due to the insane response to the events.
This kind of response is not about fighting crime, which terrorism basically is. This kind of response is about destroying the human rights and freedoms, if that still means anything to anybody.
I wish to see return to normalcy and government non-intervention, so I think voting for Ron Paul is the obvious good first step. If the man understands one thing - it's liberty and the other thing is economy.
Also, WTF, USA? Where are 10 towers in place of those 2, 10 that are 5 times as tall?
There is no such thing as fixing the economy, or making economy "grow" somehow without restructuring the debt (and I say restructuring, because clearly USA cannot pay the debt).
This is basically a bankruptcy, the bad debt, bad loans must be restructured, government needs to liquidate assets, all of those mortgage backed securities, all of the derivative instruments and SIVs that are now on Treasury books, all of that needs to be liquidated and put towards debt repayment.
This must happen immediately, and all of the debt must be paid at some amount of cents per dollar, so bond holders must be forced to take a serious haircut, they need to be punished for their nonsense.
But without this USA will absolutely, with 100% certainty NOT be able to grow the economy at all ever.
There will be a monetary collapse that will restructure the debt if the politicians are not honest enough (HUGE LAUGH, and a round of applause here, whistling and booing), this means that if Ron Paul does not win the next elections, the economy will collapse with 100% certainty, no exceptions.
The reason for this is very obvious, it's right on the surface, and only Keynesian charlatanism cannot clearly see this: interest rates.
Interest rates cannot be at 0% for the economy to grow. I explained this in my journal, when I talked about money and HFT. The problem is that savings in USA are punished by inflation, and 0% interest rates allow money printing, this is inflation. There is no way to save investment capital that is legitimately saved from underconsumption, so there is no way to restart business creation.
The 0% loans that are given to the banks are given to the banks so that they would then immediately buy T-bills from the Treasury. This is monetization of the debt, but this requires 0% interest rates, which in turn is used for gambling in the market with stock, which does not have to compete against government bonds with dividend payments.
There is no way to invest in this economy to make a return as long as the debt exists by definition at this point, because this debt requires 0% interest, and 0% interest means inflation, which creates more debt.
Raise the interest rates by 1% and owe near 300Billion more in just interest payments, so the government decided to inflate this problem away, but by inflating it away, it's going to destroy the currency and then this will be the cataclysmic event, which will put US in front of the question: do you now reclaim your individual liberties and start rebuilding, or do you turn into a command economy, with everything that follows that completely wrong decision.
USA economy is like a giant toilet, it needs to be flushed off the bad debt before the toilet can be used again. If you don't flush it, you can still use it for some time, but it will overflow, and you'll have all of the consequences where you don't want them.
You are actually correct. The REAL lowest gas price at the PUMP ever was 25cents US.
But this did include a bunch of service - people checked your tire pressure, oil, whatever else they did, like wiped the windshield. It was part of service.
Today you are not going to get that service unless you pay premium.
Move right along of-course, though it may be alone too. As always, the inner-grammar nazi strikes too late. And it's not a very strict nazi, he doesn't really bother with correct punctuation much. It's a half nazi half old jew from Odessa - aaaaah, what are you going to do?
So nothing to see here, right? Move right alone. This is double plus excellent news, just wonderful. You all should have a glass of milk with cookies.
Why am I not believing a word anybody who is in any sort of power and wants to stay in power says anymore I wonder? They may even be telling the truth, it doesn't matter.
OK, let's say it's $3.65/gallon and $3 for the dime to round this thing.
So for 1 silver dime you can get.82 gallons of gas. Or one full gallon would cost 1 dime + 18% of another dime:), so maybe 12 cents rounded.
That's cheapest gas since 1919 in terms of silver. Not the same as to say it's cheapest oil in gold, but I should have said what I normally say - cheapest gas ever in real money.
Why don't you read what I linked to on this very issue - my journal, if you wanted to get your question answered? I have enough comments here explaining all of these problems in detail.
Debt is not the cause of recession, debt is a consequence of the broken fiscal policy, which allows government to counterfeit currency. Currency counterfeiting combined with business regulations (and here is what a business regulation looks like,) combined with taxation of work and with subsidies to preferred monopolies, all of that is responsible for the recession and depression. Debt is just a consequence and a symptom of these things, and without fixing the underlying problems, neither debt nor absence of jobs will be fixed. However thinking that you can fix the unemployment without fixing the debt problem comes from complete misunderstanding of why there is debt and unemployment and why they are one and the same issue.
Printer ink is quite expensive, but it does not last and it's never being used as money, people will not barter for ink with you in most cases, thus it is not more valuable than gold.
I bet whatever the old furnaces were in the houses, are still mostly there, specifically because of the recession and depression. Where do you see people buying new houses, new roofs, new windows, new furnaces, installing better insulation and better equipment in this economy exactly?
However what DID happen in 5 years is that the prices for all fuels went up by a huge factor.
Are you seriously suggesting that America was able to replace enough furnaces, enough cars, enough machinery from 2005 to 2009 such that
total consumption of refined oil products went down from: 15,254,000 Barrels per day to 14,600,000 Barrels per day
total import of crude and products went down from 13,438,000 Barrels per day to 11,721,000 Barrels per day
total import of crude went down from 9,697,000 Barrels per day to 9,223,000 Barrels per day
The population grew from 2004 - 5 years ago US Population 293,045,739 to 2009-Current: US Population 307,006,550
and
total domestic oil production went up from 5,062,000 Barrels per day to 5,444,000 Barrels per day
while total gasoline consumed went up from
7,993,000 Barrels per day to 8,779,000 Barrels per day
while total diesel fuel consumed went up from from 3,625,000 Barrels per day to 4,099,000 Barrels per day
The growth of population and number of new vehicles being bought just for the growing population is likely responsible for a large amount of oil consumption.
However you are telling me that in 5 years time, in the time when the recession started in 2008 and continued all the way to now, the actual income have been declining in purchasing power due to all of the inflation and people losing jobs, you are telling me that the reduction in total oil consumption is due to new efficiencies? Where do you find this weird information?
Of-course, this is consistent with the depression that US and many other Western nations are in.
Depression is huge loss of production capacity - too few people have meaningful goods producing jobs in the market. The way USA is dealing with the loss of production is by abusing the status of its reserve currency, so it's printing dollars to buy consumer goods and the producers also vendor financing this spending.
So there are fewer and fewer jobs, the production capacity is going down (53Billion USD/month trade deficit), the debt is growing because government spending is constantly increasing in absolute numbers. The so called main stream 'economists' are saying that commodity prices do not matter because consumers are not buying commodities, this is completely dismissing the fact that somebody must buy the commodities to build all those consumer goods. Gold is going up only relative to the destroyed currency. Silver is almost a monetary metal itself, and Apple is selling not only in USA (which has no real purchasing power left since it has almost no production capacity left), but it's selling world wide. Of-course at some point the government will come after all of these American companies that are still making money abroad, saying that they must pay more for 'fairness' sake and will force them to liquidate various assets and to pay gigantic taxes on what will be called their "windfall" profits.
Money destruction is the same reason HFT is up, and bogus government "Job Acts" will only worsen the situation, while the crowd will be calling for various misplaced solutions that come out of general misunderstanding of what is happening.
Where do you see this 'efficiency' appearing from all of a sudden? People on fixed incomes are not making more money out of nowhere and they are seeing increase in basic living expenses, not a decrease.
ZING.
Sure, few people are spending more on making some political statements to buy hybrid vehicles for example, but in reality the cost of buying a new car is crazy high compared to cost of not buying a new car or buying an old one (of-course with Obama's cash for clunkers, the secondary market took a huge hit, but in reality that program only gave incentives for people who had pretty decent cars to replace them with newer cars because of the subsidy. People who had really bad cars didn't have money even with the subsidy to get new ones.)
There is no new efficiency. USA has a 53Billion USD/month trade deficit, half of which is energy and the other half is consumer goods. So productivity in USA is very low, efficiencies are very low, as there is no savings capital (again, thanks for inflation) to replace old tools with new ones.
With the increase of basic living expenses, who is buying more efficient anything? People are not spending on luxuries.
Slashdot Mirror
people love to lie and troll about.
- more people saying that I am trolling, yet again. Yet again, incorrectly, I don't troll ever.
I am not excited about any of these changes unfortunately, they are somewhat specialized, though having synchronous replication and serializable transaction isolation sounds more useful than other stuff.
But there are real things that are missing. Most obvious is distributing of one SQL request into parallel processes or threads to speed up query execution on multi-core systems (which are all multi-core today). The other is the entire issue of attempting to calculate execution time and failing in various cases in the planner, like the really sad cases of completely mis-handling of the mergejoin estimates, which then forces people to set enable_mergejoin to false unfortunately, it's a sledgehammer approach, but otherwise things that can execute in a few milliseconds can take tens of seconds and even minutes instead.
There are so many ways to improve performance and really kick it up, and instead there are more features added. I think database performance is now more important for PostgreSQL than features (unless this means introducing parallelization of single SQL requests.)
Otherwise it's a good database, it already provides tons of features. The one weird thing that I find though, is that for replication or hot stand by or just for creating a dynamic backup, the segments that are written to the disk are always of fixed size.
You can modify the size, which is 16MB by default, but you can only modify the size when you configure the source code before compiling it: configure --with-wal-segsize=1 - this configures the segments to 1MB, which allows the second drive to last that much longer if all you are doing is using a second drive to keep dynamic backup (and that asynchronous backup method, by the way, the problem that they are solving with "synchronous replication", it's that you either have these segments fill up, and then the segment is written to disk, or you wait until time expires for segment to be written to disk if you set checkpoint_timeout). I imagine treating fixed sized segments is easier than generating segments that are of exact size equal to amount of data that was produced in a time period, but it's a waste of disk though.
The other big thing that I would love to have in a database is ability to scale the database to multiple machines, so have a logical database span multiple disks on multiple machines, have multiple postgres processes running against those multiple disks, but have it all as one scalable database in a way that's transparent to the application. That would be some sort of a breakthrough (SAN or not).
How about Drobo or Cavalry, why not that with cron + rsync?
Of-course songs are indestructible, so maybe children of the children's children will have those without copyright? No, of-course not, by that time the copyrights will be for 500 years or the combine lifespan of all 'authors' relatives, whichever is bigger.
We just had this story "Fukushima and Chernobyl Side-by-Side", and I stand by idea that there needs to be less state, more private enterprise involved in this, because there needs to be research approaching the entire question differently - how is energy extracted from nuclear materials?
In that thread there are so many people talking how much better State ran nuclear power plants are, though Chernobyl was State ran.
I mean, here is a guy commenting: Listen, that's nuts. You can't really talk about state-run nuclear power plants without first talking about France, where about 78% of all electricity generation is nuclear. The French safety record is excellent, and it's mostly excellent because the main electricity producer was (until 2004) owned by the government, and this and this.
Yes, France has lots of nuclear power plants. Yes, they are relatively safe. No, it doesn't mean they won't have a problem. No, it doesn't mean private plants must have problems.
Sure, State can spend more money on everything, every back up possible, but that's because the State forces everybody in the state to pay up or borrows the cash from others, or prints it.
Again: how about allowing private enterprise get more involved in research and design, because I really want a nuclear powered skateboard.
Well, that's pretty stupid moderation.
In both comments, yours above, and mine there is reference to shooting stuff. So is it possible I may be onto something when I say xml makes people angrier and more violent?
The more xml I see the more I want to shoot something.
We are going in a weird direction, I am not saying it's right or wrong, but it's weirdly unpleasant and doesn't add simplicity to development, though of-course it depends what kind of development this is compared to. But I swear, the more levels of indirection is added with everything that cannot be simply executed in a debugger, the harder it's becoming to figure out what's happening quickly.
The point is that it seems to me that all these tools with multiple levels of indirection are aimed at more and more specialization, which may be fine with infinite resources on projects, but it's probably not fine in economic times, when fewer people are expected to handle more stuff.
As an atheist, I am with you on one thing: fuck religion.
But also:
Yeah! Fuck religion of starting unconstitutional wars, building an unconstitutional empire, unconstitutionally taking down democratic governments, engaging in entangling alliances, spending money on all sides, using the pretense of "fighting for freedoms", while actually stealing money in all sorts of wars, conflicts and redistributing the wealth from citizens of all countries towards some chosen military/para military and other monopolies.
Fuck that religion.
The crazy thing is, I would expect anybody who thinks that way to be an Apple zealot in the first place.
- I don't understand, why? I don't own any Apple products and I don't subscribe to the collective mentality (to say the least), but why do you think that Apple lovers are also these highly social butterflies? I know some people who use those products but they are nothing like that.
So why?
Government isn't there to protect you against other citizens.
Federal government has a mandate - border protection and protection of liberties and property and enforcement of contract.
All other functions are your local issues.
FEMA is correctly identified as an inefficient moral hazard, and it should be disbanded, and to pay for all sorts of disaster the States should have their own money left to them, and not stolen by the federal system, and then crumbs redistributed back, after most of it goes towards wars and government preferred monopolies and banks.
As I go through Heathrow, and see the blokes casually holding Heckler & Koch G36 with fingertips on the triggers, in Zurich I notice security with MP5s and in Frankfurt and Karlsruhe I see cops with Heckler & Koch 9 mm, and I have to take the shoes off, be searched, my luggage not only x-rayed, but also dusted for explosives, and then I see cops with AK47 all over Pulkovo, I will try to remember your comments here, thinking that maybe this does constitute a 'decent place', but it does make me quite uncomfortable, because they are all armed at all those places and I am not allowed.
No, corporate profits for well connected monopolies is way up due to the fiscal policy that creates this imbalance, which is basically currency destruction and thus prevention of any sort of investment opportunity, and the confused masses are searching for the solutions in all the wrong places, while government comes out with bogus ideas on job creation.
This should be a day of mourning, not just because of the people who died (one of my managers at the time, Vladimir Tomasevic, I am lucky not to have been there too), but it's a day of mourning for the liberties and freedoms lost across USA but also across the entire freaking world. The entire world today looks more and more like a crazy toon town, with cops with machine guns everywhere, insane laws, TSA, just general loss of privacy, liberty, decency, everything, and this should also include the economic calamity that obviously worsened due to the insane response to the events.
This kind of response is not about fighting crime, which terrorism basically is. This kind of response is about destroying the human rights and freedoms, if that still means anything to anybody.
I wish to see return to normalcy and government non-intervention, so I think voting for Ron Paul is the obvious good first step. If the man understands one thing - it's liberty and the other thing is economy.
Also, WTF, USA? Where are 10 towers in place of those 2, 10 that are 5 times as tall?
There is no such thing as fixing the economy, or making economy "grow" somehow without restructuring the debt (and I say restructuring, because clearly USA cannot pay the debt).
This is basically a bankruptcy, the bad debt, bad loans must be restructured, government needs to liquidate assets, all of those mortgage backed securities, all of the derivative instruments and SIVs that are now on Treasury books, all of that needs to be liquidated and put towards debt repayment.
This must happen immediately, and all of the debt must be paid at some amount of cents per dollar, so bond holders must be forced to take a serious haircut, they need to be punished for their nonsense.
But without this USA will absolutely, with 100% certainty NOT be able to grow the economy at all ever.
There will be a monetary collapse that will restructure the debt if the politicians are not honest enough (HUGE LAUGH, and a round of applause here, whistling and booing), this means that if Ron Paul does not win the next elections, the economy will collapse with 100% certainty, no exceptions.
The reason for this is very obvious, it's right on the surface, and only Keynesian charlatanism cannot clearly see this: interest rates.
Interest rates cannot be at 0% for the economy to grow. I explained this in my journal, when I talked about money and HFT. The problem is that savings in USA are punished by inflation, and 0% interest rates allow money printing, this is inflation. There is no way to save investment capital that is legitimately saved from underconsumption, so there is no way to restart business creation.
The 0% loans that are given to the banks are given to the banks so that they would then immediately buy T-bills from the Treasury. This is monetization of the debt, but this requires 0% interest rates, which in turn is used for gambling in the market with stock, which does not have to compete against government bonds with dividend payments.
There is no way to invest in this economy to make a return as long as the debt exists by definition at this point, because this debt requires 0% interest, and 0% interest means inflation, which creates more debt.
Raise the interest rates by 1% and owe near 300Billion more in just interest payments, so the government decided to inflate this problem away, but by inflating it away, it's going to destroy the currency and then this will be the cataclysmic event, which will put US in front of the question: do you now reclaim your individual liberties and start rebuilding, or do you turn into a command economy, with everything that follows that completely wrong decision.
USA economy is like a giant toilet, it needs to be flushed off the bad debt before the toilet can be used again. If you don't flush it, you can still use it for some time, but it will overflow, and you'll have all of the consequences where you don't want them.
You are actually correct. The REAL lowest gas price at the PUMP ever was 25cents US.
But this did include a bunch of service - people checked your tire pressure, oil, whatever else they did, like wiped the windshield. It was part of service.
Today you are not going to get that service unless you pay premium.
Move right along of-course, though it may be alone too. As always, the inner-grammar nazi strikes too late. And it's not a very strict nazi, he doesn't really bother with correct punctuation much. It's a half nazi half old jew from Odessa - aaaaah, what are you going to do?
So nothing to see here, right? Move right alone. This is double plus excellent news, just wonderful. You all should have a glass of milk with cookies.
Why am I not believing a word anybody who is in any sort of power and wants to stay in power says anymore I wonder? They may even be telling the truth, it doesn't matter.
Normally I put it differently.
This is price of gas since 1919 till now, lowest number there is 17 cents / gallon.
Silver dime minted between 1946-1964 is worth almost $3 (2.995USD)
Here is price of gas in Washington DC - it's between 3.59 and 3.65USD/gallon.
OK, let's say it's $3.65/gallon and $3 for the dime to round this thing.
So for 1 silver dime you can get .82 gallons of gas. Or one full gallon would cost 1 dime + 18% of another dime :), so maybe 12 cents rounded.
That's cheapest gas since 1919 in terms of silver. Not the same as to say it's cheapest oil in gold, but I should have said what I normally say - cheapest gas ever in real money.
Why don't you read what I linked to on this very issue - my journal, if you wanted to get your question answered? I have enough comments here explaining all of these problems in detail.
Debt is not the cause of recession, debt is a consequence of the broken fiscal policy, which allows government to counterfeit currency. Currency counterfeiting combined with business regulations (and here is what a business regulation looks like,) combined with taxation of work and with subsidies to preferred monopolies, all of that is responsible for the recession and depression. Debt is just a consequence and a symptom of these things, and without fixing the underlying problems, neither debt nor absence of jobs will be fixed. However thinking that you can fix the unemployment without fixing the debt problem comes from complete misunderstanding of why there is debt and unemployment and why they are one and the same issue.
Printer ink is quite expensive, but it does not last and it's never being used as money, people will not barter for ink with you in most cases, thus it is not more valuable than gold.
I bet whatever the old furnaces were in the houses, are still mostly there, specifically because of the recession and depression. Where do you see people buying new houses, new roofs, new windows, new furnaces, installing better insulation and better equipment in this economy exactly?
However what DID happen in 5 years is that the prices for all fuels went up by a huge factor.
Here, my comments are moderated "troll" when I provide actual data, because people don't like the data that shows them what actually is happening.
Gasoline Dec 2003: 0.89 USD/Gallon, Apr 2011: 3.18 USD/Gallon, price up by over 257%
Click that link and tell me that a 257% increase in price does not reduce consumption significantly. Go ahead.
As the numbers in the table and the graph are showing, up until about 2007 the usage of energy was going up.
Are you seriously suggesting that America was able to replace enough furnaces, enough cars, enough machinery from 2005 to 2009 such that
total consumption of refined oil products went down from:
15,254,000 Barrels per day to 14,600,000 Barrels per day
total import of crude and products went down from
13,438,000 Barrels per day to 11,721,000 Barrels per day
total import of crude went down from
9,697,000 Barrels per day to 9,223,000 Barrels per day
The population grew
from 2004 - 5 years ago US Population 293,045,739
to 2009-Current: US Population 307,006,550
and
total domestic oil production went up from
5,062,000 Barrels per day to 5,444,000 Barrels per day
while total gasoline consumed went up from
7,993,000 Barrels per day to 8,779,000 Barrels per day
while total diesel fuel consumed went up from
from 3,625,000 Barrels per day to 4,099,000 Barrels per day
The growth of population and number of new vehicles being bought just for the growing population is likely responsible for a large amount of oil consumption.
However you are telling me that in 5 years time, in the time when the recession started in 2008 and continued all the way to now, the actual income have been declining in purchasing power due to all of the inflation and people losing jobs, you are telling me that the reduction in total oil consumption is due to new efficiencies? Where do you find this weird information?
Of-course, this is consistent with the depression that US and many other Western nations are in.
Depression is huge loss of production capacity - too few people have meaningful goods producing jobs in the market. The way USA is dealing with the loss of production is by abusing the status of its reserve currency, so it's printing dollars to buy consumer goods and the producers also vendor financing this spending.
So there are fewer and fewer jobs, the production capacity is going down (53Billion USD/month trade deficit), the debt is growing because government spending is constantly increasing in absolute numbers. The so called main stream 'economists' are saying that commodity prices do not matter because consumers are not buying commodities, this is completely dismissing the fact that somebody must buy the commodities to build all those consumer goods. Gold is going up only relative to the destroyed currency. Silver is almost a monetary metal itself, and Apple is selling not only in USA (which has no real purchasing power left since it has almost no production capacity left), but it's selling world wide. Of-course at some point the government will come after all of these American companies that are still making money abroad, saying that they must pay more for 'fairness' sake and will force them to liquidate various assets and to pay gigantic taxes on what will be called their "windfall" profits.
Money destruction is the same reason HFT is up, and bogus government "Job Acts" will only worsen the situation, while the crowd will be calling for various misplaced solutions that come out of general misunderstanding of what is happening.
Where do you see this 'efficiency' appearing from all of a sudden? People on fixed incomes are not making more money out of nowhere and they are seeing increase in basic living expenses, not a decrease.
ZING.
Sure, few people are spending more on making some political statements to buy hybrid vehicles for example, but in reality the cost of buying a new car is crazy high compared to cost of not buying a new car or buying an old one (of-course with Obama's cash for clunkers, the secondary market took a huge hit, but in reality that program only gave incentives for people who had pretty decent cars to replace them with newer cars because of the subsidy. People who had really bad cars didn't have money even with the subsidy to get new ones.)
There is no new efficiency. USA has a 53Billion USD/month trade deficit, half of which is energy and the other half is consumer goods. So productivity in USA is very low, efficiencies are very low, as there is no savings capital (again, thanks for inflation) to replace old tools with new ones.
With the increase of basic living expenses, who is buying more efficient anything? People are not spending on luxuries.