What individuals? Most of these companies are not directly held by shareholders, but by various kinds of investment groups and institutional investors?
Is this true? I looked at the list, and almost all of those companies are publicly traded and held by shareholders. Some of the (Vanguard) are brokerages which means they're held by shareholders and financed entirely by people who buy their funds.
I can't go into a grocery store without hearing their music over the speaker, and some of what I pay for groceries goes toward the performance rights for their music.
Is this the kind of "global oligarchy" we're talking about?
The problem here is that almost all consumers prefer some kind of music and they can't have a store just for you.
There are options, however, since there are van delivery services for food.
Someone who owns 0.000000000000000001% of a company because he has 100 shares is not an "owner", but an investor.
Nope; he's a part-owner. All stock investors are part owners, even those with only 1 share.
The owners are the banks
Nope; the banks are lenders and generally aren't even 0.00001% owners.
and they are the first to take the fall, getting wiped out first if the company goes south.
Nope; all common shares are equal, and none takes the fall sooner than any other. Of course there are "preferred shares" etc but these make up less than 1% of all shares and have no more of a controlling stake.
When they get too annoying their ownership share simply gets diluted.
Nope; a company must issue more shares to dilute ownership, in which case small investors have a smaller share in a company with more money, so the value of their stake remains the same. Of course this maneuver has the same effect on larger investors.
In the most free case they can choose between pre-determined agenda #1 or pre-determined agenda #2.
Nope; they can propose any agenda.
However they certainly do not get to choose what the CEO has for dinner tonight on the company credit card,
Granted, shareholders generally don't vote on what the CEO will have for dinner.;-)
Which is why there is no money to be made in the military sector. Tanks, guns and battleship are built by philantrophs at a loss.
That doesn't contradict the claim you were responding to. Because there is "money to be made" obviously doesn't imply that it's helpful for the economy (think Lehman Bros. here, or WWII for the Germans).
Corporations seek to control wealth, by any means necessary.
Corporations seek profit which they must get from consumers.
We've all got to eat. Those who control the means of production control who eats. Those who control the finance system control who works and who doesn't, and who has a home to go to at night. That is every bit as coercive as any governmental power.
Do you really think this? Do you think that Bill Gates could say "so-and-so must no longer eat" and could pull it off? Why haven't corporations starved you for disagreeing, if they have total power already? Why didn't they just starve everyone who "occupies" Wall St or various other places?
Nobody controls the means of the production in the sense you mean it, unless they own all farmland as a single entity and can prevent anyone from entering the food production market.
Unfortunately, our government is wholly owned by those very corporations we need to be protected from.
This isn't even an exaggeration; it's just pure fiction.
The largest lobbies at present (by a very wide margin) are the AARP and the trial lawyers' union. Of course it's fine for them to represent their interests, but it easily disproves the notion that the government is already a wholly owned subsidiary of corporations.
There were 2 radionucleides released which are particularly important: iodine-131 and cesium-137. Of those, ioidine-131 is about 1000x more radioactive and has a half-life of about 8 days. It has already done its damage and decayed. Only 0.01% remains. In other words, the horse has already left the barn. If you wanted to do something, then the time to do so was within 2 weeks after the meltdown.
Your chances of having been harmed are small.
Don't take anything you read on slashot too seriously.
The US already has an excellent network of low-cost state schools. For example, in California (where I live) there are three tiers: the upper one costs about $14000 per year, and the middle one costs about $6000 per year. Those tuitions are the maximum you can pay. If you're not rich then you pay considerably less. There are also much cheaper options like attending city college for basic classes (calculus 2, differential equations, etc) and then transferring. It's entirely possible to pay $12000 in tuition for your entire college education.
However most people in the US these days consider those options beneath them and would rather attend expensive private universities with manicured lawns, beautiful gardens, nice buildings, and only a few students per professor. Those schools cost $60 000 per year (10x more than state school!) and there are many such schools now. Attending those schools requires taking out loans of $150 000.
Make all education free for all. That's what Finland is doing
That means Finland is subsidizing the upper middle class at the expense of others.
What we need to do is stop providing access to $150 000 loans to 17-year-old kids. The government requires and guarantees that 17 year olds be offered such loans. However, students should be offered far fewer loans. If, after that, they can't afford a $60 000 per year school then they should consider attending a non-luxury school.
You were nothing near an economic and/or career expert when you were 17, and neither is/was anyone else. Stop it.
That's the tragedy of all this. Why isn't anyone telling them not to do this.
Personally I think that 17-year-olds should be legally forbidden from taking out $100k in debts which they can't default upon. I think there should be an absolute legal limit which is much lower than that, and if you can't afford the school you want, then you go to state school.
Maybe you should have told him that six years ago when he started college,
Personally I did advise several young people not to attend a $60k/yr private University which is so common now. I suggested they should go to state school instead.
Personally I try to discourage people every time I see an outrageous bubble where people are taking out massive loans to "invest" in something. Ohwell, what can I do...
I think that Universities charge so much, because students suddenly were allowed to take out $100k loans, so they were willing and able to pay that much.
When I was in college I used to sell computers and stereo equip at a retailer like Best Buy. While there, I never witnessed people coming in and saying that they would never buy the $400 stereo because music is what makes us human and its sublime and they demand to spend $40k. If they had done that, Best Buy would have raised its prices.
Nobody who looks at higher education these days is comparing prices and trying to get the most they can for the least amount of money possible. (Otherwise they would all go to state, which near me is $6k per year, not $60k). Instead there is this notion that any amount of money is justified for schooling and that the more it costs, the better. Of course, prices will go up in that circumstance.
Don't put to much faith in the peak oil/doomer prognostications. Peak oil doomerism is a quack theory which has been wrong at 100% of its predictions, and will continue to be wrong, because its methods are mistaken.
How do you propose to replace the petroleum that ends in plastics, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, and son and so forth?
Fertilizers are made from natural gas at present, but can be made from any hydrogen source, including electrolysis of water as a last resort.
Plastics are easily replaceable by silicones which are only slightly more expensive, and are made from silicate rock, which is available in vast quantities. Even if plastics were not replaceable in that way, we would easily transition to substitutes since almost all plastics are used for disposable items like water bottles etc, and we could easily revert to aluminum cans or glass which (again) are practically inexhaustible.
Nor are FF necessary for energy, since there's a vast amount of energy available to us from either nuclear or renewable sources. FF do not have a particularly good energy density, since their energy density is about 1/1000000th that of nuclear fuel.
In short, fossil fuels are not necessary for civilization. In fact, fossil fuels are a paltry, dirty energy source which should have been relegated to a niche status decades ago, and would have been if the environmental movement hadn't interfered with the deployment of nuclear power.
We are not running out of basic materials or energy, nor will we ever run out, until our Sun explodes in billions of years. We have enough energy and raw materials, to cover this planet with a miles-deep layer of steel, aluminum, concrete, glass, electronics, and plasticky silicone crap, and to keep it that way for billions of years. Obviously we will face big ecological problems, but not of "running out".
Energy doomerism is the result of a series of basic mathematical errors, and incorrect unstated assumptions. Energy and resource doomerism are just mistakes, that's all.
I've always believed that with the internet, we could achieve true democracy where people vote on Parliamentary/Senate/Congress issues DIRECTLY rather than through representatives. We're not there yet, but hopefully we will be soon.
My goodness, what a terrifying prospect. It would be a disaster if people could propose legislation and vote on it directly. That would mean cataclysm. How would the people formulate a national budget? People can't even manage their own personal finances (housing bubble, college loans), much less those of society more generally.
Limited power? Yes. Constitutional rights? Yes. Representative Democracy? Yes. Direct political participation? NO.
Direct democracy would just end up in dictatorship anyway. Direct democracy would fuck everything up so badly in 5 years that the current predicament would seem like good times in retrospect. For example, people would pass a law which says that Social Security benefits must be tripled and their taxes halved, or something similar. Or that we'll institute a "living wage" while increasing salaries for the middle and upper-middle classes too. Or we should take all investment capital from the top 1% and distribute it equally for consumption. Or we should stick it to the drug companies. Or the Chinese. Or we'll fight global warming and phase out nuclear (Germany). After which, all the accountants in government would quit at some point, which would be "OK" because they're a bunch of uptight elitist asshole suits anyway (and maybe traitors besides). Then there wouldn't even be any consistency in legislation, or any way to know what to expect next. Then everything would collapse. Then people would vote for a dictator who promised to restore order and who promised a return to the "good old days." Since people ultimately don't want freedom (they want a condo and Netflix, and that's what they'd try to achieve by direct voting), they would vote for a dictator at that point who promised to fix everything, and they could accomplish it by amending the constitution directly to allow dictatorial powers.
Take a look at the Greek protests, which have people simultaneously demanding high benefits and chanting "I won't pay" for basic taxes and tolls.
Right now the people themselves are the main impediment to rational policies. Any rational and well-thought-out policy is always profoundly unpopular because it cannot be explained in 8 seconds or less to someone with no prior understanding.
If people can't be trusted to monitor their politicians, then they can't be trusted to govern. Right now politicians are corrupt because voters don't even read a single word of the thousands of pages of legislation that politicians pass. How would things be better, if people voted directly upon that legislation? Or if we decentralized this function to non-experts? People would vote for legislation based upon the "gist" they received from the first few sentences of that legislation, and the result isn't hard to predict.
Almost all of our problems are caused by hyper-democracy already. The solution is not more democracy. Remember that most of our crises (dot-com bubble, real estate bubble, and the coming disaster of unrepayable college loans for millions of people) were caused by people trying to invest, something which they simply cannot do. Warren Buffet can invest; "the people" cannot.
What we need is more elitism. The people should restrain themselves to ordering their own personal lives, to punishing politicians who made serious mistakes, and to punishing unconstitutional usurpations of political power. The peoples' only function should be to say "no" on occasion to ideas proposed by elites. They should never, ever try to implement their own ideas directly. It would make more sense if they started designing bridges directly, or performing surgery on each other without prior training.
You and your millions are no match for our power. We know where you live, we know where you work and where you play. We're coming for you. You had better be afraid, very afraid.
Power to the people, dude.
We're coming for you. You had better be afraid, very afraid.
Happily, what you wrote is just wrong. You're not coming for anyone. The left is so fractured, disorganized, and intellectually bankrupt that it could never accomplish a damn thing. They're 20 years away (at least!) from from doing anything, and they may not even be moving in the right direction.
The financial crisis could have been the left's golden moment. It was a prime example of Wall Street bankers fucking everything up in a gigantic show of failure for capitalism. Nevertheless the left couldn't even seize that moment. The left had no coherent message whatsoever. What most people took away from the financial crisis, was that it was caused by the Federal Reserve and by Government, so we should fire Ben Bernanke.
IMO the left never recovered from the failure of Marxism decades ago. They've had nothing since. They can't even agree on a common set of ideas. Whereas they used to promise revolution, and say things like "speak truth to power!", these days they mostly retreat into academia and mumble post-colonial gibberish to each other quietly.
There are also a few hangers-on who retain the Marxist dream, and who claim implausibly that Marxism has "never really been tried." What a joke of an ideology. It's as old as rain. It's the tired, comfortable old left. I've never seen anything so pathetic as watching the tired, old Howard Zinn say in one of his final speeches that we should give communism one more reconsideration. That was passe in 1948. So much for "progressive".
Then there is the branch of the left which promises to be a less severe version of the right. The leftism of Clinton, Gore, and Obama. But this is a kind of surrender because it grants that your opposition is essentially correct.
Look, you've lost. I went to the "99 percent" website, where occupiers can post their grievances, and most of it was college students complaining about their loans. That's not a movement; it's a bitch fest. The last ideas you guys had were from Noam Chomsky, and he's not gonna kick down my door anytime soon.
All the alternative fuels you mention are good to explore, but they are nowhere near ready to deploy on the massive scale our system requires.
Oil will deplete very gradually, and we'll have more than 3 decades to adjust.
You don't own anything made from plastic?
I explicitly addressed this in my post, in the next sentence: "Granted, many things are made out of plastic which is essentially oil. However there are many, many easy alternatives to plastic (like silicones, etc) which are slightly more expensive."
You're not listening. NONE of them is as versatile, easy, or cheap as oil.
I was listening. You said that there "IS NO next" option.
But there are many options. The options become cost-competitive when gasoline costs about $6/gallon or so. Granted, increasing prices and declining availability may force us to drive Prius-style plug-in hybrids within 40 years, but that's not the end of the world.
There are also alternatives to long-haul trucking. For example, we could revert to trains, and could start using all those abandoned rail lines from the early 20th century we have lying around. Trains use about 1/8th the amount of energy, per pound-mile, as large trucks.
Bear in mind that the national highway system was built in the 1950s, and before that we used trains to transport most things. We transitioned from trains to trucks in about 30 years and obviously could do the reverse, probably in much less time if we really needed to do so.
Why would nothing else change? Because we have no viable source of cheap energy that can replace oil. There are other sources of electricity, but nothing can replace oil for transportation, manufacturing and agriculture. That is a fact.
What about natural gas powered vehicles? Trolley buses? Plug-in hybrids? Electric trains and subways? Gas to liquids? Coal to liquids? Anhydrous ammonia? Hydrocarbons made using the Fischer-tropsch process (or many other similar chemical processes) out of energy and any carbon source? These are all practical, proven technologies which have been available for years or decades, although more expensive than what we're doing now.
There are also hypothetical technologies like algal biodiesel, cellulosic ethanol, fuel cells, etc, which are alternative and also less polluting. However those aren't ready yet.
nothing can replace oil for... manufacturing
Oil isn't used much for manufacturing. Overwhelmingly, manufacturing uses electricity, and heat for smelting. Granted, many things are made out of plastic which is essentially oil. However there are many, many easy alternatives to plastic (like silicones, etc) which are slightly more expensive.
There IS no next easiest option.
There are many, many other options. Thousands of them.
False. We haven't undergone a major energy transition since we switched from steam to internal combustion engines, and from coal to natural gas for heat.
We're undergoing energy transitions all the time; you just haven't heard of it. You say we get our energy from "coal" but coal is a term describing a wide variety of minerals (anthracite, lignite, many others) in many different kinds of geologic formations, with a wide variety of extraction technologies which are constantly changing. As one kind of coal becomes depleted, another is used. As one kind of technology is insufficient, the next cheapest is used. This has already happened many, many times.
With oil, we're undergoing a transition right now to unconventional oil like tar sands, etc. This transition is happening without you even noticing it. In this case the word "oil" is kind of a misnomer because tar sands have no gasoline fractions in them whatsoever. They are a substance which is converted into oil using a chemical process. No gasoline or diesel could be extracted from them. In this case the "oil" is manufactured from something else.
and from coal to natural gas for heat.
Most people don't realize that this transition happened in the 1940s-1960s. Before that, the gas piped into peoples' homes was town gas which was created through the steam reformation of coal, and was mostly HO and carbon monoxide.
More than half of our electricity in the US still comes from coal. You want to talk solar, hydroelectric, nuclear? Call me when they make a dent.
France converted almost its entire electricity infrastructure to nuclear in a few decades without spending too much money. France has 60 million people and is not a pilot project.
The reason we haven't done so is political.
California (pop 35 million) converted its entire electricity infrastructure to natural gas. Coal burning is now essentially illegal in the state.
The "peak oil" warnings are about what will happen IF we continue to do things the way we are.
Nope, because peak oilists incorrectly assess how we are doing things right now. We are always undergoing an energy transition, and have always done so, since the beginning of the industrial revolution. And we have already "run out of energy using conventional technology" dozens of times, since "conventional technology" generally means "cheapest right now."
AND nothing else changes.
Why would nothing else change? Do you mean we would face gradually declining net energy over centuries and do nothing to transition to other forms of energy despite obvious, strong economic incentives for individual actors to transition? Have we ever faced the situation where nothing else changes?
If you're relying on some energy deus-ex-technology to save us from depletion, you're playing some long odds.
No, because you've wrongly assumed that oil is the only technology available and that everything else is "deus-ex-technology". In fact there are many easy, obvious alternatives which exist already and which aren't used now, because they're marginally more expensive or less convenient than oil. When oil runs out, we'll use the next easiest option. Happily, there are many alternatives (like solar thermal, batteries, and breeder reactors) which are already developed and are practically inexhaustible.
Sigh. The peak oil doom movement will never die, no matter how often it gets everything wrong.
The stuff is finite, we've been tapping it for years... logically we should be preparing for the possibility that we simply have none.
Nope, because you've wrongly assumed that the rate of depletion is linear. If the rate of extraction is not linear or won't continue to be so, then we may never reach the day when we "simply have none." For example, oil could deplete according to an asymptotic function. Or, more likely, we could switch from oil when its extraction has gradually become so expensive (and alternatives cheaper) that we gradually switch and leave the remainder of oil (which will be the vast majority of it) in the ground.
Just because something is finite, and we've tapped it for years, doesn't necessarily imply that we'll ever use all of it.
You speak of "simple mathematics" but the problem is that doomers almost invariably apply the wrong mathematical function to whatever quantity they're trying to model. For example, they apply an exponential function to quantities which are not growing exponentially (population, energy consumption per capita). Or they draw a simple graph, with a straight line showing declining oil resources, and then extrapolate the line into the future when we have zero oil. But that's all wrong.
It doesn't help to use "simple mathematics," if you use the wrong mathematical function. That's like trying to multiply 5*6, but pressing the "addition" button on your calculator instead, and getting the wrong result, then claiming that the answer must be right because it's a matter of "simple mathematics." Simple or not, you must still choose the correct mathematical function--something which doomers invariably fail to do.
The doomer energy-descent scenario isn't happening. Not now, not 100 years from now, not 1 million years from now. We'll stop using oil when we don't want it anymore because it's more expensive than alternatives. There will never be "none" remaining in the ground.
hate pollution as much as anyone, although I can't find any reliable evidence for you 50k deaths a year from coal burning alone.
Then you're not looking very hard. Unfortunately it's not covered extensively in the press but the EPA routinely estimates the number of people killed by lung disease as a result of coal emissions.
No. Tidal power does not alter the course of water flow, it merely uses the natural tides.
Almost nobody is using tidal power at present. That is less than 0.1% of all hydro power generated. I thought you were referring to the hydro which actually existed, or which anyone seriously plans to build in the forseeable future.
If you are going to rubbish hydroelectric power at least bother to learn about it first. Even Wikipedia could tell you that much.
I actually have some idea what I'm talking about.
Germany is doing it for economic reasons - the world has gone off nuclear so there is little point spending money developing it, but there is huge and growing demand for clean energy.
Germany is not doing it for economic reasons. Germany is doing it because of public outcry, because of misguided concerns of safety. For Germany, nuclear power is by far the cheapest option since they've already constructed the plants. By shutting down those nuke plants prematurely, they will spend billions compared to just leaving the nuke plants running.
Germany decided to shut down all nuke plants as a result of popular panic, in the immediate aftermath of Fukushima. It was an irrational and stupid decision, and they will pay dearly for it (and so will others). They just spent a lot of money to kill many people and badly damage the environment.
Anyway, you seem to be obsessed with coal for some reason, but I was never advocating it.
I am "obsessed" with coal because I live in the actual world where that's how we generate electricity (not tidal power). In case you didn't notice, the world generates more than 60% of its electricity from coal.
Almost all countries generate the vast majority of their electricity from two sources: coal and nuclear. Those two sources, are the actual alternatives at present. By shutting down its nuclear plants, Germany has chosen to increase its coal consumption. In fact, Germany has already ordered 4GW more in coal capacity in the last few months.
Nuclear and coal are alternatives which we face at present so one is relevant to the other.
You claimed repeatedly that nuclear had risks which far surpassed anything else. This is totally wrong. What we are doing right now has risks which far surpass anything else, and which far surpass the risks of nuclear.
The point you were responding to was that the media overemphasizes nuclear problems while downplaying or ignoring coal ones. What I said was completely relevant to that and to your post. The coal explosion was just an example for a broader point about risk comparison.
I completely agree with you: fossil fuels are causing major problems throughout the world. Rising sea levels are just one of those problems. We need to do something about them. But that's a different subject.
It is not a different subject insofar as nuclear and coal are alternatives to each other, and we'll use one or the other.
How large an area was made uninhabitable by that coal plant explosion?
How large an area will be made uninhabitable by coal emissions raising the sea level 5m? I bet it's more than 20 km across. Last time I checked the "exclusion zone" will include Florida, and the deep south, and northern china, and Manhattan, and south asia (including almost all of Bangladesh). In fact much of the population of the world lives within 5m of sea level.
Let's compare the exclusion zones from all western nuclear plants (nobody is seriously considering building soviet RBMK reactors) against the area underwater from a sea level increase. Then adjust for the amount of electricity generated from each source, and the time period the area will remain uninhabitable (300 years for nuclear, 5000 for sea level to return to normal).
My back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the average coal plant causes more than 100,000x more uninhabitable area than a nuclear plant with similar output.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this true? I looked at the list, and almost all of those companies are publicly traded and held by shareholders. Some of the (Vanguard) are brokerages which means they're held by shareholders and financed entirely by people who buy their funds.
Is this the kind of "global oligarchy" we're talking about?
The problem here is that almost all consumers prefer some kind of music and they can't have a store just for you.
There are options, however, since there are van delivery services for food.
Small groups of lawyers do this, by creating patent troll companies.
Maybe it's a problem with the patent system.
Apple/microsoft are not the same company.
If any company had their way, there would be no competitors. However, that clearly hasn't happened yet.
Do you really think Chrysler was so influential that it could force the government to bail them out?
Why do they sell cars?
Nope; he's a part-owner. All stock investors are part owners, even those with only 1 share.
Nope; the banks are lenders and generally aren't even 0.00001% owners.
Nope; all common shares are equal, and none takes the fall sooner than any other. Of course there are "preferred shares" etc but these make up less than 1% of all shares and have no more of a controlling stake.
Nope; a company must issue more shares to dilute ownership, in which case small investors have a smaller share in a company with more money, so the value of their stake remains the same. Of course this maneuver has the same effect on larger investors.
Nope; they can propose any agenda.
Granted, shareholders generally don't vote on what the CEO will have for dinner. ;-)
Nope. One thing doesn't imply the other.
Do you intend that link to the definition of plutocracy, as evidence in favor of your claim?
That doesn't contradict the claim you were responding to. Because there is "money to be made" obviously doesn't imply that it's helpful for the economy (think Lehman Bros. here, or WWII for the Germans).
Wrong, wrong, wrong...
Corporations seek profit which they must get from consumers.
Do you really think this? Do you think that Bill Gates could say "so-and-so must no longer eat" and could pull it off? Why haven't corporations starved you for disagreeing, if they have total power already? Why didn't they just starve everyone who "occupies" Wall St or various other places?
Nobody controls the means of the production in the sense you mean it, unless they own all farmland as a single entity and can prevent anyone from entering the food production market.
This isn't even an exaggeration; it's just pure fiction.
The largest lobbies at present (by a very wide margin) are the AARP and the trial lawyers' union. Of course it's fine for them to represent their interests, but it easily disproves the notion that the government is already a wholly owned subsidiary of corporations.
There were 2 radionucleides released which are particularly important: iodine-131 and cesium-137. Of those, ioidine-131 is about 1000x more radioactive and has a half-life of about 8 days. It has already done its damage and decayed. Only 0.01% remains. In other words, the horse has already left the barn. If you wanted to do something, then the time to do so was within 2 weeks after the meltdown.
Your chances of having been harmed are small.
Don't take anything you read on slashot too seriously.
The US already has an excellent network of low-cost state schools. For example, in California (where I live) there are three tiers: the upper one costs about $14000 per year, and the middle one costs about $6000 per year. Those tuitions are the maximum you can pay. If you're not rich then you pay considerably less. There are also much cheaper options like attending city college for basic classes (calculus 2, differential equations, etc) and then transferring. It's entirely possible to pay $12000 in tuition for your entire college education.
However most people in the US these days consider those options beneath them and would rather attend expensive private universities with manicured lawns, beautiful gardens, nice buildings, and only a few students per professor. Those schools cost $60 000 per year (10x more than state school!) and there are many such schools now. Attending those schools requires taking out loans of $150 000.
That means Finland is subsidizing the upper middle class at the expense of others.
What we need to do is stop providing access to $150 000 loans to 17-year-old kids. The government requires and guarantees that 17 year olds be offered such loans. However, students should be offered far fewer loans. If, after that, they can't afford a $60 000 per year school then they should consider attending a non-luxury school.
That's the tragedy of all this. Why isn't anyone telling them not to do this.
Personally I think that 17-year-olds should be legally forbidden from taking out $100k in debts which they can't default upon. I think there should be an absolute legal limit which is much lower than that, and if you can't afford the school you want, then you go to state school.
Personally I did advise several young people not to attend a $60k/yr private University which is so common now. I suggested they should go to state school instead.
Personally I try to discourage people every time I see an outrageous bubble where people are taking out massive loans to "invest" in something. Ohwell, what can I do...
I think that Universities charge so much, because students suddenly were allowed to take out $100k loans, so they were willing and able to pay that much.
When I was in college I used to sell computers and stereo equip at a retailer like Best Buy. While there, I never witnessed people coming in and saying that they would never buy the $400 stereo because music is what makes us human and its sublime and they demand to spend $40k. If they had done that, Best Buy would have raised its prices.
Nobody who looks at higher education these days is comparing prices and trying to get the most they can for the least amount of money possible. (Otherwise they would all go to state, which near me is $6k per year, not $60k). Instead there is this notion that any amount of money is justified for schooling and that the more it costs, the better. Of course, prices will go up in that circumstance.
Don't put to much faith in the peak oil/doomer prognostications. Peak oil doomerism is a quack theory which has been wrong at 100% of its predictions, and will continue to be wrong, because its methods are mistaken.
Fertilizers are made from natural gas at present, but can be made from any hydrogen source, including electrolysis of water as a last resort.
Plastics are easily replaceable by silicones which are only slightly more expensive, and are made from silicate rock, which is available in vast quantities. Even if plastics were not replaceable in that way, we would easily transition to substitutes since almost all plastics are used for disposable items like water bottles etc, and we could easily revert to aluminum cans or glass which (again) are practically inexhaustible.
Nor are FF necessary for energy, since there's a vast amount of energy available to us from either nuclear or renewable sources. FF do not have a particularly good energy density, since their energy density is about 1/1000000th that of nuclear fuel.
In short, fossil fuels are not necessary for civilization. In fact, fossil fuels are a paltry, dirty energy source which should have been relegated to a niche status decades ago, and would have been if the environmental movement hadn't interfered with the deployment of nuclear power.
We are not running out of basic materials or energy, nor will we ever run out, until our Sun explodes in billions of years. We have enough energy and raw materials, to cover this planet with a miles-deep layer of steel, aluminum, concrete, glass, electronics, and plasticky silicone crap, and to keep it that way for billions of years. Obviously we will face big ecological problems, but not of "running out".
Energy doomerism is the result of a series of basic mathematical errors, and incorrect unstated assumptions. Energy and resource doomerism are just mistakes, that's all.
My goodness, what a terrifying prospect. It would be a disaster if people could propose legislation and vote on it directly. That would mean cataclysm. How would the people formulate a national budget? People can't even manage their own personal finances (housing bubble, college loans), much less those of society more generally.
Limited power? Yes. Constitutional rights? Yes. Representative Democracy? Yes. Direct political participation? NO.
Direct democracy would just end up in dictatorship anyway. Direct democracy would fuck everything up so badly in 5 years that the current predicament would seem like good times in retrospect. For example, people would pass a law which says that Social Security benefits must be tripled and their taxes halved, or something similar. Or that we'll institute a "living wage" while increasing salaries for the middle and upper-middle classes too. Or we should take all investment capital from the top 1% and distribute it equally for consumption. Or we should stick it to the drug companies. Or the Chinese. Or we'll fight global warming and phase out nuclear (Germany). After which, all the accountants in government would quit at some point, which would be "OK" because they're a bunch of uptight elitist asshole suits anyway (and maybe traitors besides). Then there wouldn't even be any consistency in legislation, or any way to know what to expect next. Then everything would collapse. Then people would vote for a dictator who promised to restore order and who promised a return to the "good old days." Since people ultimately don't want freedom (they want a condo and Netflix, and that's what they'd try to achieve by direct voting), they would vote for a dictator at that point who promised to fix everything, and they could accomplish it by amending the constitution directly to allow dictatorial powers.
Take a look at the Greek protests, which have people simultaneously demanding high benefits and chanting "I won't pay" for basic taxes and tolls.
Right now the people themselves are the main impediment to rational policies. Any rational and well-thought-out policy is always profoundly unpopular because it cannot be explained in 8 seconds or less to someone with no prior understanding.
If people can't be trusted to monitor their politicians, then they can't be trusted to govern. Right now politicians are corrupt because voters don't even read a single word of the thousands of pages of legislation that politicians pass. How would things be better, if people voted directly upon that legislation? Or if we decentralized this function to non-experts? People would vote for legislation based upon the "gist" they received from the first few sentences of that legislation, and the result isn't hard to predict.
Almost all of our problems are caused by hyper-democracy already. The solution is not more democracy. Remember that most of our crises (dot-com bubble, real estate bubble, and the coming disaster of unrepayable college loans for millions of people) were caused by people trying to invest, something which they simply cannot do. Warren Buffet can invest; "the people" cannot.
What we need is more elitism. The people should restrain themselves to ordering their own personal lives, to punishing politicians who made serious mistakes, and to punishing unconstitutional usurpations of political power. The peoples' only function should be to say "no" on occasion to ideas proposed by elites. They should never, ever try to implement their own ideas directly. It would make more sense if they started designing bridges directly, or performing surgery on each other without prior training.
Power to the people, dude.
Happily, what you wrote is just wrong. You're not coming for anyone. The left is so fractured, disorganized, and intellectually bankrupt that it could never accomplish a damn thing. They're 20 years away (at least!) from from doing anything, and they may not even be moving in the right direction.
The financial crisis could have been the left's golden moment. It was a prime example of Wall Street bankers fucking everything up in a gigantic show of failure for capitalism. Nevertheless the left couldn't even seize that moment. The left had no coherent message whatsoever. What most people took away from the financial crisis, was that it was caused by the Federal Reserve and by Government, so we should fire Ben Bernanke.
IMO the left never recovered from the failure of Marxism decades ago. They've had nothing since. They can't even agree on a common set of ideas. Whereas they used to promise revolution, and say things like "speak truth to power!", these days they mostly retreat into academia and mumble post-colonial gibberish to each other quietly.
There are also a few hangers-on who retain the Marxist dream, and who claim implausibly that Marxism has "never really been tried." What a joke of an ideology. It's as old as rain. It's the tired, comfortable old left. I've never seen anything so pathetic as watching the tired, old Howard Zinn say in one of his final speeches that we should give communism one more reconsideration. That was passe in 1948. So much for "progressive".
Then there is the branch of the left which promises to be a less severe version of the right. The leftism of Clinton, Gore, and Obama. But this is a kind of surrender because it grants that your opposition is essentially correct.
Look, you've lost. I went to the "99 percent" website, where occupiers can post their grievances, and most of it was college students complaining about their loans. That's not a movement; it's a bitch fest. The last ideas you guys had were from Noam Chomsky, and he's not gonna kick down my door anytime soon.
Oil will deplete very gradually, and we'll have more than 3 decades to adjust.
I explicitly addressed this in my post, in the next sentence: "Granted, many things are made out of plastic which is essentially oil. However there are many, many easy alternatives to plastic (like silicones, etc) which are slightly more expensive."
I was listening. You said that there "IS NO next" option.
But there are many options. The options become cost-competitive when gasoline costs about $6/gallon or so. Granted, increasing prices and declining availability may force us to drive Prius-style plug-in hybrids within 40 years, but that's not the end of the world.
There are also alternatives to long-haul trucking. For example, we could revert to trains, and could start using all those abandoned rail lines from the early 20th century we have lying around. Trains use about 1/8th the amount of energy, per pound-mile, as large trucks.
Bear in mind that the national highway system was built in the 1950s, and before that we used trains to transport most things. We transitioned from trains to trucks in about 30 years and obviously could do the reverse, probably in much less time if we really needed to do so.
What about natural gas powered vehicles? Trolley buses? Plug-in hybrids? Electric trains and subways? Gas to liquids? Coal to liquids? Anhydrous ammonia? Hydrocarbons made using the Fischer-tropsch process (or many other similar chemical processes) out of energy and any carbon source? These are all practical, proven technologies which have been available for years or decades, although more expensive than what we're doing now.
There are also hypothetical technologies like algal biodiesel, cellulosic ethanol, fuel cells, etc, which are alternative and also less polluting. However those aren't ready yet.
Oil isn't used much for manufacturing. Overwhelmingly, manufacturing uses electricity, and heat for smelting. Granted, many things are made out of plastic which is essentially oil. However there are many, many easy alternatives to plastic (like silicones, etc) which are slightly more expensive.
There are many, many other options. Thousands of them.
We're undergoing energy transitions all the time; you just haven't heard of it. You say we get our energy from "coal" but coal is a term describing a wide variety of minerals (anthracite, lignite, many others) in many different kinds of geologic formations, with a wide variety of extraction technologies which are constantly changing. As one kind of coal becomes depleted, another is used. As one kind of technology is insufficient, the next cheapest is used. This has already happened many, many times.
With oil, we're undergoing a transition right now to unconventional oil like tar sands, etc. This transition is happening without you even noticing it. In this case the word "oil" is kind of a misnomer because tar sands have no gasoline fractions in them whatsoever. They are a substance which is converted into oil using a chemical process. No gasoline or diesel could be extracted from them. In this case the "oil" is manufactured from something else.
Most people don't realize that this transition happened in the 1940s-1960s. Before that, the gas piped into peoples' homes was town gas which was created through the steam reformation of coal, and was mostly HO and carbon monoxide.
France converted almost its entire electricity infrastructure to nuclear in a few decades without spending too much money. France has 60 million people and is not a pilot project.
The reason we haven't done so is political.
California (pop 35 million) converted its entire electricity infrastructure to natural gas. Coal burning is now essentially illegal in the state.
Sweden, Japan, many others.
Nope, because peak oilists incorrectly assess how we are doing things right now. We are always undergoing an energy transition, and have always done so, since the beginning of the industrial revolution. And we have already "run out of energy using conventional technology" dozens of times, since "conventional technology" generally means "cheapest right now."
Why would nothing else change? Do you mean we would face gradually declining net energy over centuries and do nothing to transition to other forms of energy despite obvious, strong economic incentives for individual actors to transition? Have we ever faced the situation where nothing else changes?
No, because you've wrongly assumed that oil is the only technology available and that everything else is "deus-ex-technology". In fact there are many easy, obvious alternatives which exist already and which aren't used now, because they're marginally more expensive or less convenient than oil. When oil runs out, we'll use the next easiest option. Happily, there are many alternatives (like solar thermal, batteries, and breeder reactors) which are already developed and are practically inexhaustible.
Sigh. The peak oil doom movement will never die, no matter how often it gets everything wrong.
Nope, because you've wrongly assumed that the rate of depletion is linear. If the rate of extraction is not linear or won't continue to be so, then we may never reach the day when we "simply have none." For example, oil could deplete according to an asymptotic function. Or, more likely, we could switch from oil when its extraction has gradually become so expensive (and alternatives cheaper) that we gradually switch and leave the remainder of oil (which will be the vast majority of it) in the ground.
Just because something is finite, and we've tapped it for years, doesn't necessarily imply that we'll ever use all of it.
You speak of "simple mathematics" but the problem is that doomers almost invariably apply the wrong mathematical function to whatever quantity they're trying to model. For example, they apply an exponential function to quantities which are not growing exponentially (population, energy consumption per capita). Or they draw a simple graph, with a straight line showing declining oil resources, and then extrapolate the line into the future when we have zero oil. But that's all wrong.
It doesn't help to use "simple mathematics," if you use the wrong mathematical function. That's like trying to multiply 5*6, but pressing the "addition" button on your calculator instead, and getting the wrong result, then claiming that the answer must be right because it's a matter of "simple mathematics." Simple or not, you must still choose the correct mathematical function--something which doomers invariably fail to do.
The doomer energy-descent scenario isn't happening. Not now, not 100 years from now, not 1 million years from now. We'll stop using oil when we don't want it anymore because it's more expensive than alternatives. There will never be "none" remaining in the ground.
Then you're not looking very hard. Unfortunately it's not covered extensively in the press but the EPA routinely estimates the number of people killed by lung disease as a result of coal emissions.
Almost nobody is using tidal power at present. That is less than 0.1% of all hydro power generated. I thought you were referring to the hydro which actually existed, or which anyone seriously plans to build in the forseeable future.
I actually have some idea what I'm talking about.
Germany is not doing it for economic reasons. Germany is doing it because of public outcry, because of misguided concerns of safety. For Germany, nuclear power is by far the cheapest option since they've already constructed the plants. By shutting down those nuke plants prematurely, they will spend billions compared to just leaving the nuke plants running.
Germany decided to shut down all nuke plants as a result of popular panic, in the immediate aftermath of Fukushima. It was an irrational and stupid decision, and they will pay dearly for it (and so will others). They just spent a lot of money to kill many people and badly damage the environment.
I am "obsessed" with coal because I live in the actual world where that's how we generate electricity (not tidal power). In case you didn't notice, the world generates more than 60% of its electricity from coal.
Almost all countries generate the vast majority of their electricity from two sources: coal and nuclear. Those two sources, are the actual alternatives at present. By shutting down its nuclear plants, Germany has chosen to increase its coal consumption. In fact, Germany has already ordered 4GW more in coal capacity in the last few months.
Nuclear and coal are alternatives which we face at present so one is relevant to the other.
You claimed repeatedly that nuclear had risks which far surpassed anything else. This is totally wrong. What we are doing right now has risks which far surpass anything else, and which far surpass the risks of nuclear.
The point you were responding to was that the media overemphasizes nuclear problems while downplaying or ignoring coal ones. What I said was completely relevant to that and to your post. The coal explosion was just an example for a broader point about risk comparison.
It is not a different subject insofar as nuclear and coal are alternatives to each other, and we'll use one or the other.
How large an area will be made uninhabitable by coal emissions raising the sea level 5m? I bet it's more than 20 km across. Last time I checked the "exclusion zone" will include Florida, and the deep south, and northern china, and Manhattan, and south asia (including almost all of Bangladesh). In fact much of the population of the world lives within 5m of sea level.
Let's compare the exclusion zones from all western nuclear plants (nobody is seriously considering building soviet RBMK reactors) against the area underwater from a sea level increase. Then adjust for the amount of electricity generated from each source, and the time period the area will remain uninhabitable (300 years for nuclear, 5000 for sea level to return to normal).
My back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the average coal plant causes more than 100,000x more uninhabitable area than a nuclear plant with similar output.