And the price can only go up so much before it's economic to extract it from more places. Even if the energy cost of getting it out is above the energy in the oil oil isn't valuable just for having energy in it. Oil is valuable because it's so energy dense and easily transportable.
But no. because you used the word "millions" a lot you're right. I'm sure you'll be prepared for the future where the strong eat the brains of the weak.
but even that's only after having consumed centuries of human knowledge to reach that point.
Sure Einstein has his moments where he did something really brilliant that no person was likely to have ever considered, but even that's only after having consumed centuries of human knowledge to reach that point.
(why the fuck would you invest in something that is guaranteed to produce less and less)
You mean why would anyone invest in a company which controls the last few remaining reserves of a resource which will be worth more and more?
Lol no. Most people are like you, and don't have any reason to believe the market will collapse. Most people think we have much more accessible oil than we really do.
The way you put it it's the people who assume that money will be worthless and don't even try to invest in alternatives who would be doing the least good and greedy traders who assume that the economy will survive and invest accordingly who'd do the most to compensate for oil running out.
Our consumption rate of oil is going up. Our dependency is GROWING. Our supply is dwindling. No one is ready for oil's price to skyrocket.
HAND WAVE !!!!HAND WAVE !!!HAND WAVE!!
So what if our consumption is still going up?
Baaahahahaha! You are seriously comparing 1940s to now??? If they were "pretty dependent" in 1940, then now they are "super mother fucking ridiculously dependent".
HAND WAVE !!!!HAND WAVE !!!HAND WAVE!!
.
Well, after the banks were tapped people couldn't get their money anymore. I believe that a world with a lot more people in it will tap the banks much faster.
There's also more banks and better PR departments.
WTF. I start with the assumption that oil price will skyrocket and go on to explain how all the ICEs become useless after such an event. Then you think it's relevant to point out that the ICEs don't become useless because the oil price won't skyrocket. Way to contribute nothing there.
You've set a date in your head and marked it as *oil becomes useless here*. Not "oil doubles in price on this day" or even "oil costs 50 times more on this day" it's all about it becoming useless.
How is this hard to understand: the day oil becomes twice as expensive to buy the usage also drops off as millions of people go "wow, that plane journey is far more expensive than it's worth for me" while other people who are doing more important things, transporting more valuable goods or just have more money to throw at the problem keep using oil just the same. and as such the usage drops to meet supply. It might be painful and poorer countries will be hit harder but that's just what happens. it's not that hard to understand. Usage is not set in stone by god. it's set by millions of people making economic decisions. It's basic basic economics.
So I'm guessing you didn't ever google "peak oil". Because it is an elaborate theory worth at least reading and given critical thought. Dismissing it for no reason doesn't do you any good, at least exercise your brain before dismissing it.
I read it long ago. I've been familiar with the concept far longer than you have. It's not exactly a new idea. It sounds like you saw a youtube video with someone shouting about how the end is nigh and then checked out the wiki. It's not a new idea to me. It's not a new idea to investment bankers. It's not a new idea to many people at all.
I have no problem with the idea of peak oil. it's quite a straight forward idea.
The problem is between the lines of "oil will suddenly get more expensive and this will probably cause a recession" and "we'll all feast on the brains of our neighbors while killing for gas".
You are really good at not reading what I write! I never said the majority of people know how screwed we are.
And you seem to be having problems with the idea that lots of people know about this. Lots of people know that oil will get far more expensive in the foreseeable future.
Even if we were running on nukes, we would run into peak ura
the point was that if you have a botnet based on american PC's with the command and control in another country cutting the cables does little good since even a dialup connection into the US network would be good enough to SSH into one of your bots and issue commands.
You can cut all the thick pipes easy but the thin ones are impossible to deal with.
in any case it's all political posturing with no real basis in reality.
Who are "they"? "they" could be anyone on the internet who knows their way around a compiler.
So the question becomes:
What does any person,corporation,club,society,gang,country or group of cats pretending to be a person gain by attacking right now? Pretty much anything you can imagine and not limited to things which are real. Example: Information about the aliens.
kids, teenagers, adults, script kiddies, crackers, hackers and groups who can afford to hire professionals have been and are attacking systems all the time. Any government agency could very well be lost in the crowd.
The organised malware business is already leagues ahead of anything script kiddies use. it's embraced outsourcing. The people writing viruses these days are professionals. They're not doing it for the lulz like when we were kids, it's cold hard business. They teenagers who used to write viruses which turned your mouse into a penis have grown up and now they're not going to do anything unless there's cash in it for them. The rootkits that are out there are already more advanced than the rootkit detectors and even the best AV programs have perhaps a 20% hit rate. (not miss rate)
They already have countermeasures ready for security measures that we haven't even deployed yet
They put a crowd of idiots who couldn't find their arses with both hands, didn't know the law, didn't know about the internet and didn't know about technology in a room and then expected them to do what? Make sensible choices?
If you want good decisions in that situation you get a small group of experienced sys admins, a couple of really really good lawyers and one person with enough authority and enough sense to keep quiet who's job it is to shout at people until the plans the others have come up with happen.
The politicians meanwhile can be put in another soundproofed room where they can drink coffee, make grand stupid plans and convince themselves they're saving the world while everyone else actually deals with the problems.
Any "real" cyber attack is going to happen at 3 am, the sys admins in the organisations being attacked will for the most part be the only ones who know anything is happening with the exception of a few people who can't get the *organisations web page* to load until after the event. Just like what happens all the time now when organisations get attacked.
Why would any of that happen??? The internet is essentially millions of walled and gated communities. Everything that any hypothetical attacker could try is already being done by the legions of script kiddies right through to highly paid top notch programmers working for organised criminal groups.
If any hypothetical attacker from china or *scary place* wanted to launch a DDoS attack why would they write anything of their own when they can just pay for bandwidth from one of the big botnet herders? Government entities hardly have a monopoly on hackers.
A million Sys admins the world over already deal with these problems every single day of the year.
or.... and this may be a way way out there idea.... they know very well. They've evaluated the risks and they don't expect it to happen 6 months from now.
No this isn't my assumption. My hypothesis is that once the market crashes and oil becomes unaffordable (as in it costs more to travel to work than your job pays) things will go to hell. It's really not that unreasonable, if the market crashes. Remember the first stock market collapse? That was one of these overnight catastrophes.
You're using circular logic-
Why won't the traders/companies/oil companies/ everyone else take into account the fact that oil will run out and invest/plan accordingly? -because there's no point since once the market collapses all the money they could make by taking that into account will be useless.
Why will the market collapse and money become useless? -because nobody will take into account in any way the fact that oil will run out.
Only if the infrastructure was in place to make the easy switch. Let's stay in reality here.
Have a look at the UK during the second world war. They were pretty dependent on oil even then and yet when the military was grabbing all they could and the germans were sinking the ships carrying the rest you know what happened? Food still got transported, things got a little more scarce, oil cost more, oil got rationed, people came up with alternative means of transport. It didn't all grind to a halt overnight.
Now what you're talking about is far less traumatic, no uboats for one thing.
What are you talking about? Economies can be shattered extremely quickly. Black Thursday? Good point about the oil taking time to run out. It's been a hundred years and our consumption rate is still increasing.
And after black Thursday all the contracts were void? no.
Do all the hundreds of million ICEs that power the world magically turn into coal/natural gas/uranium engines when oil becomes unaffordable?
No. they just get gradually more and more expensive to run. as they get more and more expensive to run more and more people switch to other types of engine. (oh sure, they wouldn't do that since the economy will collapse and hence there's no point in investing in plants to produce electric engines or in companies which build nuclear plants)
Exactly the reason people who know about peak oil don't invest in such ways.
"peak oil" just means that supply will gradually decrease and the price will increase. every investor in the field knows that that's going to happen.
Only if the infrastructure was in place to make the easy switch. Let's stay in reality here.
*goes round and round in the circular logic* Which of course nobody will build because there's no point since the economy will collapse and all the money they'd make would be useless.
f it takes more energy to produce the oil than the amount of energy you get out of that oil, you do not make money, period. The flaw with your reasoning is that you think the cost of mining the oil stays constant. If it costs $100 to mine $80 worth of oil now, then when that oil is worth $200 it will cost more than $200 to retrieve it. The cost of retrieval is entirely dependent on the price of energy.
Actually no. Completely wrong but intuitively it sounds right. Oil is used for things other than power(industry, lubricant etc).
Lets say we have a nice big area of tar sands somewhere where electricity is cheap, like near a nuclear power plant. You use twice as many BTUs of energy than there is in a barrel of oil to get one barrel of oil out of the ground. That electricity costs you 100 dollars.
Meanwhile all the people with old ICE's which they don't want to replace with electric engines are still looking to buy oil as are the rail companies who are shipping the coal to the power plants and haven't finished upgrading their trains to electricetc etc. This pushes the cost per barrel to 200 dollars.
Oh god, that could be glorious. A firefox extension which submits every page you can find to be blocked! Either bury them in 15 miles of paperwork or blackout the internet for them.
This is an example of sampling bias. The crap your grandmother bought which broke right away you never see. The handful of items which were unusually well made and which lasted are all all that survive to get included in your experience.
People were complaining about the exact same thing long before you were born because *item they bought in the last year* broke while *Item they inherited from their great great grandfather* is obviously extremely well built and obviously they build things better in those days.
There has always been cheap crap which breaks right away.
I'm guessing they just didn't want to do the expensive paperwork.
As a supporter of nuclear energy I say nail em to the wall. Prosecute so hard that no other exec will dream of fucking with nuclear safety regulations.
I'm guessing that it's a mistake or that it doesn't scale well or that if you try it they melt but if you could build some ultra efficient collector like that then even if it was expensive it would mean cheap PV by means of a big cheap mirror and a small expensive panel.
It's like getting an unlisted telephone number and using your secret plans as your answering machine message. Nothing like entering without permission.
My problem is that all your theories either assume that nobody sees what you see (and we can be sure that the oil company execs know very well how big the reserves really are) or that they are, for some strange and unknown reasn not being greedy.
Crude oil isn't all that useful for surviving. You seem to have started with the assumption that the moment people have to pay twice as much to fill their tanks they'll start smashing in the heads of everyone around them in order to feast on the grey matter within.
The fact that oil went from $50 in '07 to $100 in '08 and back to $50 in '09 is a great indicator of how volatile the oil market is becoming.
I'd say it's more that people thought what you were predicting was almost here, they gambled wrong and lost a lot of money.
(don't forget to factor in the oil cost of BUILDING a plant),
You keep talking in terms of oil cost. it's energy cost not oil cost. If oil price went through the roof people would use natural gas. If oil and gas both go through the roof people start cracking coal for gas. etc etc. economies take time to collapse and oil takes time to run out. The poeple who'll own it and who drive up the prices are comodities traders who won't actually have it in their possession and as such won't be able to trade it for sex in the road warrior style future you predict.
if the US economy was based on exporting oil then high oil prices would be good for the US. Since the US imports more oil than it exports and has large reserves of it's own which it can tap in case of emergency if the price goes very high then suddenly it's economic to invest in other resources.
how fast can companies tap "crappy" oil reserves? If the price goes skyward then you can be sure companies will be going nuts trying to pull oil out of the less profitable places, if it costs 100 dollars to pull it out of the ground and you can only sell it for 80 then you're going to leave it there. if you can sell it for 200 then you'll pull it out and sell it.
I'm just not seeing how we're going to wake up one day and suddenly money will be worthless, nobody will do anything for a profit and oil companies will magically not be greedy. And all with not even a days warning.
Slashdot Mirror
And the price can only go up so much before it's economic to extract it from more places.
Even if the energy cost of getting it out is above the energy in the oil oil isn't valuable just for having energy in it. Oil is valuable because it's so energy dense and easily transportable.
But no. because you used the word "millions" a lot you're right.
I'm sure you'll be prepared for the future where the strong eat the brains of the weak.
but even that's only after having consumed centuries of human knowledge to reach that point.
Sure Einstein has his moments where he did something really brilliant that no person was likely to have ever considered, but even that's only after having consumed centuries of human knowledge to reach that point.
(why the fuck would you invest in something that is guaranteed to produce less and less)
You mean why would anyone invest in a company which controls the last few remaining reserves of a resource which will be worth more and more?
Lol no. Most people are like you, and don't have any reason to believe the market will collapse. Most people think we have much more accessible oil than we really do.
The way you put it it's the people who assume that money will be worthless and don't even try to invest in alternatives who would be doing the least good and greedy traders who assume that the economy will survive and invest accordingly who'd do the most to compensate for oil running out.
Our consumption rate of oil is going up. Our dependency is GROWING. Our supply is dwindling. No one is ready for oil's price to skyrocket.
HAND WAVE !!!!HAND WAVE !!!HAND WAVE!!
So what if our consumption is still going up?
Baaahahahaha! You are seriously comparing 1940s to now??? If they were "pretty dependent" in 1940, then now they are "super mother fucking ridiculously dependent".
HAND WAVE !!!!HAND WAVE !!!HAND WAVE!!
.
Well, after the banks were tapped people couldn't get their money anymore. I believe that a world with a lot more people in it will tap the banks much faster.
There's also more banks and better PR departments.
WTF. I start with the assumption that oil price will skyrocket and go on to explain how all the ICEs become useless after such an event. Then you think it's relevant to point out that the ICEs don't become useless because the oil price won't skyrocket. Way to contribute nothing there.
You've set a date in your head and marked it as *oil becomes useless here*.
Not "oil doubles in price on this day" or even "oil costs 50 times more on this day" it's all about it becoming useless.
How is this hard to understand: the day oil becomes twice as expensive to buy the usage also drops off as millions of people go "wow, that plane journey is far more expensive than it's worth for me" while other people who are doing more important things, transporting more valuable goods or just have more money to throw at the problem keep using oil just the same. and as such the usage drops to meet supply. It might be painful and poorer countries will be hit harder but that's just what happens.
it's not that hard to understand.
Usage is not set in stone by god. it's set by millions of people making economic decisions.
It's basic basic economics.
So I'm guessing you didn't ever google "peak oil". Because it is an elaborate theory worth at least reading and given critical thought. Dismissing it for no reason doesn't do you any good, at least exercise your brain before dismissing it.
I read it long ago.
I've been familiar with the concept far longer than you have.
It's not exactly a new idea.
It sounds like you saw a youtube video with someone shouting about how the end is nigh and then checked out the wiki.
It's not a new idea to me.
It's not a new idea to investment bankers.
It's not a new idea to many people at all.
I have no problem with the idea of peak oil.
it's quite a straight forward idea.
The problem is between the lines of "oil will suddenly get more expensive and this will probably cause a recession" and "we'll all feast on the brains of our neighbors while killing for gas" .
You are really good at not reading what I write! I never said the majority of people know how screwed we are.
And you seem to be having problems with the idea that lots of people know about this. Lots of people know that oil will get far more expensive in the foreseeable future.
Even if we were running on nukes, we would run into peak ura
the point was that if you have a botnet based on american PC's with the command and control in another country cutting the cables does little good since even a dialup connection into the US network would be good enough to SSH into one of your bots and issue commands.
You can cut all the thick pipes easy but the thin ones are impossible to deal with.
in any case it's all political posturing with no real basis in reality.
Who are "they"?
"they" could be anyone on the internet who knows their way around a compiler.
So the question becomes:
What does any person,corporation,club,society,gang,country or group of cats pretending to be a person gain by attacking right now?
Pretty much anything you can imagine and not limited to things which are real.
Example:
Information about the aliens.
kids, teenagers, adults, script kiddies, crackers, hackers and groups who can afford to hire professionals have been and are attacking systems all the time.
Any government agency could very well be lost in the crowd.
If it helps the US has more script kiddies than almost anyone else and I somehow doubt that many other countries have fantastic security either.
read:
http://webtorque.org/wp-content/uploads/malware_biz.pdf
The organised malware business is already leagues ahead of anything script kiddies use.
it's embraced outsourcing.
The people writing viruses these days are professionals.
They're not doing it for the lulz like when we were kids, it's cold hard business.
They teenagers who used to write viruses which turned your mouse into a penis have grown up and now they're not going to do anything unless there's cash in it for them.
The rootkits that are out there are already more advanced than the rootkit detectors and even the best AV programs have perhaps a 20% hit rate. (not miss rate)
They already have countermeasures ready for security measures that we haven't even deployed yet
How could it have gone any other way?
They put a crowd of idiots who couldn't find their arses with both hands, didn't know the law, didn't know about the internet and didn't know about technology in a room and then expected them to do what?
Make sensible choices?
If you want good decisions in that situation you get a small group of experienced sys admins, a couple of really really good lawyers and one person with enough authority and enough sense to keep quiet who's job it is to shout at people until the plans the others have come up with happen.
The politicians meanwhile can be put in another soundproofed room where they can drink coffee, make grand stupid plans and convince themselves they're saving the world while everyone else actually deals with the problems.
Any "real" cyber attack is going to happen at 3 am, the sys admins in the organisations being attacked will for the most part be the only ones who know anything is happening with the exception of a few people who can't get the *organisations web page* to load until after the event.
Just like what happens all the time now when organisations get attacked.
Why would any of that happen???
The internet is essentially millions of walled and gated communities.
Everything that any hypothetical attacker could try is already being done by the legions of script kiddies right through to highly paid top notch programmers working for organised criminal groups.
If any hypothetical attacker from china or *scary place* wanted to launch a DDoS attack why would they write anything of their own when they can just pay for bandwidth from one of the big botnet herders?
Government entities hardly have a monopoly on hackers.
A million Sys admins the world over already deal with these problems every single day of the year.
or.... and this may be a way way out there idea.... they know very well.
They've evaluated the risks and they don't expect it to happen 6 months from now.
last but got cut off.
It may even cause a recession of some kind and food riots in poor countries.
I see no possible reason for a sudden decent into a Road Warrior style future.
No this isn't my assumption. My hypothesis is that once the market crashes and oil becomes unaffordable (as in it costs more to travel to work than your job pays) things will go to hell. It's really not that unreasonable, if the market crashes. Remember the first stock market collapse? That was one of these overnight catastrophes.
You're using circular logic-
Why won't the traders/companies/oil companies/ everyone else take into account the fact that oil will run out and invest/plan accordingly?
-because there's no point since once the market collapses all the money they could make by taking that into account will be useless.
Why will the market collapse and money become useless?
-because nobody will take into account in any way the fact that oil will run out.
Only if the infrastructure was in place to make the easy switch. Let's stay in reality here.
Have a look at the UK during the second world war.
They were pretty dependent on oil even then and yet when the military was grabbing all they could and the germans were sinking the ships carrying the rest you know what happened?
Food still got transported, things got a little more scarce, oil cost more, oil got rationed, people came up with alternative means of transport.
It didn't all grind to a halt overnight.
Now what you're talking about is far less traumatic, no uboats for one thing.
What are you talking about? Economies can be shattered extremely quickly. Black Thursday? Good point about the oil taking time to run out. It's been a hundred years and our consumption rate is still increasing.
And after black Thursday all the contracts were void?
no.
Do all the hundreds of million ICEs that power the world magically turn into coal/natural gas/uranium engines when oil becomes unaffordable?
No.
they just get gradually more and more expensive to run. as they get more and more expensive to run more and more people switch to other types of engine.
(oh sure, they wouldn't do that since the economy will collapse and hence there's no point in investing in plants to produce electric engines or in companies which build nuclear plants)
Exactly the reason people who know about peak oil don't invest in such ways.
"peak oil" just means that supply will gradually decrease and the price will increase.
every investor in the field knows that that's going to happen.
Only if the infrastructure was in place to make the easy switch. Let's stay in reality here.
*goes round and round in the circular logic*
Which of course nobody will build because there's no point since the economy will collapse and all the money they'd make would be useless.
f it takes more energy to produce the oil than the amount of energy you get out of that oil, you do not make money, period. The flaw with your reasoning is that you think the cost of mining the oil stays constant. If it costs $100 to mine $80 worth of oil now, then when that oil is worth $200 it will cost more than $200 to retrieve it. The cost of retrieval is entirely dependent on the price of energy.
Actually no.
Completely wrong but intuitively it sounds right.
Oil is used for things other than power(industry, lubricant etc).
Lets say we have a nice big area of tar sands somewhere where electricity is cheap, like near a nuclear power plant.
You use twice as many BTUs of energy than there is in a barrel of oil to get one barrel of oil out of the ground.
That electricity costs you 100 dollars.
Meanwhile all the people with old ICE's which they don't want to replace with electric engines are still looking to buy oil as are the rail companies who are shipping the coal to the power plants and haven't finished upgrading their trains to electricetc etc.
This pushes the cost per barrel to 200 dollars.
WOW! yo
Oh god, that could be glorious.
A firefox extension which submits every page you can find to be blocked!
Either bury them in 15 miles of paperwork or blackout the internet for them.
This is an example of sampling bias.
The crap your grandmother bought which broke right away you never see. The handful of items which were unusually well made and which lasted are all all that survive to get included in your experience.
People were complaining about the exact same thing long before you were born because *item they bought in the last year* broke while *Item they inherited from their great great grandfather* is obviously extremely well built and obviously they build things better in those days.
There has always been cheap crap which breaks right away.
Read:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/sewtha.pdf
expense.
paperwork.
ignorance.
incompetence.
or all of the above,
I'm guessing they just didn't want to do the expensive paperwork.
As a supporter of nuclear energy I say nail em to the wall.
Prosecute so hard that no other exec will dream of fucking with nuclear safety regulations.
seconded.
nail em to the wall.
This is a trivial leak but a serious matter.
I don't know why but somehow this sounds right.
Seconded.
I'm guessing that it's a mistake or that it doesn't scale well or that if you try it they melt but if you could build some ultra efficient collector like that then even if it was expensive it would mean cheap PV by means of a big cheap mirror and a small expensive panel.
It's like getting an unlisted telephone number and using your secret plans as your answering machine message.
Nothing about attempts to turn the doorknobof an insecure office and make copies of highly confidential documents
It's like getting an unlisted telephone number and using your secret plans as your answering machine message.
Nothing like entering without permission.
Oh god, if I had mod points I wouldn't just mod this up, I'd track down all your other posts and mode them up too!
This is the most glorious....
My problem is that all your theories either assume that nobody sees what you see (and we can be sure that the oil company execs know very well how big the reserves really are) or that they are, for some strange and unknown reasn not being greedy.
Crude oil isn't all that useful for surviving.
You seem to have started with the assumption that the moment people have to pay twice as much to fill their tanks they'll start smashing in the heads of everyone around them in order to feast on the grey matter within.
The fact that oil went from $50 in '07 to $100 in '08 and back to $50 in '09 is a great indicator of how volatile the oil market is becoming.
I'd say it's more that people thought what you were predicting was almost here, they gambled wrong and lost a lot of money.
(don't forget to factor in the oil cost of BUILDING a plant),
You keep talking in terms of oil cost.
it's energy cost not oil cost.
If oil price went through the roof people would use natural gas.
If oil and gas both go through the roof people start cracking coal for gas.
etc etc.
economies take time to collapse and oil takes time to run out.
The poeple who'll own it and who drive up the prices are comodities traders who won't actually have it in their possession and as such won't be able to trade it for sex in the road warrior style future you predict.
if the US economy was based on exporting oil then high oil prices would be good for the US.
Since the US imports more oil than it exports and has large reserves of it's own which it can tap in case of emergency if the price goes very high then suddenly it's economic to invest in other resources.
how fast can companies tap "crappy" oil reserves?
If the price goes skyward then you can be sure companies will be going nuts trying to pull oil out of the less profitable places, if it costs 100 dollars to pull it out of the ground and you can only sell it for 80 then you're going to leave it there.
if you can sell it for 200 then you'll pull it out and sell it.
I'm just not seeing how we're going to wake up one day and suddenly money will be worthless, nobody will do anything for a profit and oil companies will magically not be greedy.
And all with not even a days warning.