If you really think that, then you're a loony. Falling prices reward people for saving, and free up capital that would otherwise go toward consumption spending for capital, allowing the production of more real goods for less. And by less, I don't just mean less money, but less energy, and less raw materials as well. This is a universal good that certain idiot voodoo economists who are in charge of our economy have managed to demonize. Is it any wonder that we are falling from our number one spot in everything?
You do know that AGW receives ~100x from grant funding as much as denialists do from all sources, right?
Or does money from the government not count? If so, why? Is it because governments are not corruptible? Is it because bureaucrats don't exhibit any form of bias in their behavior?
Yes, there is an AGW community, just like there is a string theory community, just like there is a physics community. I don't know why you think there is a negative connotation to a word describing a group of people, other than the possibility that you want AGW to be ascribed some higher description, like "fundamental universal truth" or something. But that would be biased, wouldn't it?
As to the "happy to write papers on other things bit, tell that to the scientists throughout history who have clung to their outdated ideas because that is what they had spent their entire careers researching, and lost all funding when their models were proven to be false, and then died in poverty and obscurity. Your failure to recognize even POTENTIAL sources of bias and conflicts of interest makes me think that you are not rational. ,br>
Your example is a foolish one. You conflate something that is easily visible and observable by any and every person on the planet with what is at best a tortuously slow process that can only be seen through careful application of often opaque statistical methods by people who would in fact be out of a job if they proved definitively that a given scary hypothesis was wrong, a hypothesis which demands extraordinary sacrifice from every human being on the planet in order to fix a problem of unknown magnitude, which many of those same scientists claim can no longer be fixed by any means, at the cost of mass starvation in the third world, which is currently reliant on food exports from the US and other petro-agriculture nations.
So yes, you had better be DAMN sure, and you need to shut up with this self-affirming "it's been proven" BS. NO other branch of science crushes dissent in this manner, even in the face of flat Earthers or anti-evolutionists. The abundance of well documented, repeatable data marginalizes the crazy opinions without the need for vicious ad hominem attacks by zealots. Indeed, the presence of zealots indicates that some other process than rationality is at play in the field. The absolute abundance of them almost guarantees it. That doesn't have an effect on whether they are right or not, but in the past the universal presence of such zealots meant the thesis was actually wrong, or at least unprovable/untestable.
Remember that your own zealotry in this reply of yours is in response to a three sentence call for more replicates than one to be performed. Remember the recent debacle with the faster than light particles at CERN? What if everyone had been as zealous as you are now about the existence of faster than light particles, and they had applied all manner of models to the data that it generated. What if the same people had repeated the experiment over and over, continuing to get the same result? What if the people who called for independent reviews had been called "denialists", and had their grant funding stripped? What if all science was run like climate science?
Peak oil in a free market will have exactly as much effect on industry and society as peak charcoal did during the industrial revolution in England and continental Europe, and as much as peak whale oil had in the Eastern US. But we don't have a free market. We have what you fascist two-partiers have given us, a Department of Energy that has done everything in its power to increase reliance on foreign oil. A regulatory regime that has stopped nuclear dead in its tracks. Costly regulation that has ground our manufacturing base into dust even as free market reforms in China allowed the development of an industrial base large enough to supply the world with everything.
Also, your post is the longest fucking string of ad hominem I think I have ever seen. Why so much bile? Funny, I get called a liberal on one of the financial websites I visit. Some crazy racists even claimed I was black because I am anti-racism. Now here you are trying to conflate me with fucking David Duke because I recognize that AGW is dubious, and the "solution" is a thousand times worse than any possible problem that could come about from even the absolute worst case scenario. But hey, it's a quasi-free country (thanks to you and your fascist heros and their fascist pretend enemies), you can say what you want for now, as long as you don't say it where any government official can hear you, lol. Enjoy your banana republic, scumbag.
HFCS isn't in practically all forms of caloric food in Europe (yet). It is in America.
The lifestyles of Americans and other first-worlders aren't that different. People, given the same circumstances, aren't that different. The differences come from different circumstances. But people prefer to think that people they don't like are evil mutants.
People need justification to be skeptical of answers that don't make a lot of sense (or even those that do--as even the sensical answer is often the WRONG one) pending repeats of the study? Come the fuck on.
The point is that they weren't right. Their numbers are not reflected by reality. Their "worst case" was too low, indicating that there was something wrong with their model.
I don't see why this article is news. Let's have a study of ALL of the climate change papers published between, say, 1971 and 1991. This reeks of cherry picking. In fact, it reminds me of a financial scam artist from a few years back. He would amass a giant email list, and send "market headed up" predictions to half, and "market going down" predictions to the other half. When the market went one way or another, he would them cut them in half again, and so on. After five or six iterations, he was able to totally convince a small subsection that he was totally right, and got them to pay him a huge amount of money for future predictions, whereupon everyone who paid lost huge amounts of money.
Seriously, things don't go in a straight line forever. Further, they were quite totally wrong, in that their predictions were too low. I don't know what the big deal is, other than AGW people glorying in their own selection bias.
Please mod parent up. This is a real and important point that the AGW community should address if they want to be taken seriously. More replicates never hurt.
Most people in atmospheric science rely on grants. Grant writers write what they think they want the reviewers to hear. More often than not, they are right.
Our system of government-funded science has created a perverse incentive (as government interventions are wont to do). This is undeniable. The only thing you can deny is the extent to which this effect has corrupted the system and the scientific community. I tend to think the corruption is widespread, but not 100%. Those who believe in global warming will tend to think that the corruption is minimal.
In my experience, it is usually the pessimist who is more right, and they are still too optimistic.
http://pricedingold.com/ They have many charts of commodity prices, many going back a hundred years. The trend over the time period is quite clear, where the prices of those things have generally fallen dramatically due to technological advance, while the trend over the last few years is sideways, while the prices of those things in dollars has gone up, up, UP, showing without a doubt that it is in fact the DOLLAR that is moving. You can tell that this is the case without even looking at money supply charts. If you did, your mind would recoil in horror, and you would either go into a catatonic state, or immediately move to a fortified mountain compound to wait "it" out.
Uh, no, he said that Malthus would have been correct (as in with his timing) but for a technological advance, but we're all still doomed because calories. lol, as if humans turned cranks to generators to produce light for plants, or as if we relied on food plants to produce fuel.
Peak oilers are as a group narcissists, basically death worshippers. They aren't interested in hearing about anything that goes against the central thesis of "we're all going to die in the next $arbitrarytimeperiod". It doesn't matter what new technologies you show them (I once had a POer try to tell me that the ECAT was fundamentally flawed, not because it was cold fusion pseudoscience, but because there is a limited amount of NICKLE IN THE EARTH. That is the mentality you are dealing with when you talk to these people. Talk about "weird".
Plants seem to have done fine gathering energy without using post peak minerals. And the minerals don't just vanish in current technologies. When the price goes high enough, they will simply be recycled.
Peak theorists, in general, have no clue how economics works. They only look at supply, rarely at demand, and NEVER at price.
You need to learn to tell the difference between private property and public property. Private property it traded between people at a prevailing market price, such that when a given material becomes scarce (read: oil), then the price goes up, driving demand down. WIth public property, there is no price, so demand is always infinite. Thugs will take EVERYTHING that they can. This is what happened in Easter Island. The Maya didn't collapse because there was no water, they WALKED AWAY because the priests were LYING TO THEM. They asked the people to sacrifice untold amounts of blood and living hearts to bring the rain, but the rain never came, so they just gave up.
You don't need any magic materials to have thorium reactors. You need a regulatory regime that doesn't "just say no" to anything with the word "nuclear" in it, and goes a step farther and doesn't "just say no" when you tell them you want to use a differnt type of reactor than what is currently used. It isn't the technology or the science that has held back thorium and other technologies, ITS THE GOVERNMENT.
Commodities have gone NOWHERE. Fiat currencies have gone DOWN.
Challenges like this happens all the time. The English faced deforestation and "peak charcoal", but switched to a new process for smelting steel using coke, which wound up being more efficient, and allowed for another hundred years of industrial growth.
The Maya didn't reach peak anything--the most current thought is that they had a long drought and the people lost faith in their priests, so they walked away from their ceremonial city centers. They certainly didn't die. They are still there. And the Easter Islanders were barbarians who had no concept of land as property, so their thug chiefs took all the wood and used it to erect statues in their own honor. Peak theory had nothing to do with it. It's not like they were EATING the trees, or even using them for fuel.
Don't fall for the lies of the death cult. They have used the same ones for generations, and will continue to make the same ones for generations to come. The fact is that oil is only one source of energy, and it is rarely used as such. Its main uses are as energy dense fuel (which can be replaced with metal-air batteries or synthetic hydrocarbons), and as chemical feedstocks, which can be replaced with oil-producing plants and microorganisms. For ENERGY, there are many, MANY sources, the vast majority of which haven't been developed yet. Thorium can run the world for a thousand years. Probably long enough to get a few working fusion plants going. Hell, maybe long enough to figure out the secrets of creation.
If they are angry on "think of the children" grounds, then shouldn't they be mad about the fact that the characters are having SEX, not just that the characters are the same sex?
Except that it is the same with ALL commodities. You really think all this shit "just happens" to be going on at the same time? Dr. House would call you an idiot. There is one root cause for this entire situation--central bank intervention in the markets.
Sure, like the "peak" in Russian oil production that "just happened" to coincide with the collapse of their state. Except, whoops, now their production is rising again.
When real demand falls, real production falls. Claiming that price has nothing to do with it is batshit insane. Price has EVERYTHING to do with it. But you want to ignore real price data because it runs counter to your hypothesis. This is something only zealots do. Stop being a zealot.
So when I turn off my kitchen faucet, I would be right to say "peak water is here!"?
No. Monetary manipulation is destroying the economy, which has lead to declining demand. Real costs of production in dollar terms are rising because the world is being flooded with dollars. Price oil in gold, and you will see what I mean. If oil really was becoming scarce, its real price would be rising. http://pricedingold.com/crude-oil/
Further, think about what you are saying here. You are denying the fact of technological progress. This flies in the face of every decade of the past 400 years. You think technological progress has peaked too? You think everything JUST HAPPENS to be shutting down RIGHT NOW, when YOU are here to make crazy predictions? You think the world is REALLY ending THIS time, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands of other times people have predicted the end?
Not money growing on trees, purchasing power growing on trees. That means you can take the money off of the trees, jam that crap into the ground, and whatever you want pops out, along with the money you jammed in there.
Slashdot Mirror
Falling prices are bad?
If you really think that, then you're a loony. Falling prices reward people for saving, and free up capital that would otherwise go toward consumption spending for capital, allowing the production of more real goods for less. And by less, I don't just mean less money, but less energy, and less raw materials as well. This is a universal good that certain idiot voodoo economists who are in charge of our economy have managed to demonize. Is it any wonder that we are falling from our number one spot in everything?
You do know that AGW receives ~100x from grant funding as much as denialists do from all sources, right?
Or does money from the government not count? If so, why? Is it because governments are not corruptible? Is it because bureaucrats don't exhibit any form of bias in their behavior?
Yes, there is an AGW community, just like there is a string theory community, just like there is a physics community. I don't know why you think there is a negative connotation to a word describing a group of people, other than the possibility that you want AGW to be ascribed some higher description, like "fundamental universal truth" or something. But that would be biased, wouldn't it?
As to the "happy to write papers on other things bit, tell that to the scientists throughout history who have clung to their outdated ideas because that is what they had spent their entire careers researching, and lost all funding when their models were proven to be false, and then died in poverty and obscurity. Your failure to recognize even POTENTIAL sources of bias and conflicts of interest makes me think that you are not rational.
,br> Your example is a foolish one. You conflate something that is easily visible and observable by any and every person on the planet with what is at best a tortuously slow process that can only be seen through careful application of often opaque statistical methods by people who would in fact be out of a job if they proved definitively that a given scary hypothesis was wrong, a hypothesis which demands extraordinary sacrifice from every human being on the planet in order to fix a problem of unknown magnitude, which many of those same scientists claim can no longer be fixed by any means, at the cost of mass starvation in the third world, which is currently reliant on food exports from the US and other petro-agriculture nations.
So yes, you had better be DAMN sure, and you need to shut up with this self-affirming "it's been proven" BS. NO other branch of science crushes dissent in this manner, even in the face of flat Earthers or anti-evolutionists. The abundance of well documented, repeatable data marginalizes the crazy opinions without the need for vicious ad hominem attacks by zealots. Indeed, the presence of zealots indicates that some other process than rationality is at play in the field. The absolute abundance of them almost guarantees it. That doesn't have an effect on whether they are right or not, but in the past the universal presence of such zealots meant the thesis was actually wrong, or at least unprovable/untestable.
Remember that your own zealotry in this reply of yours is in response to a three sentence call for more replicates than one to be performed. Remember the recent debacle with the faster than light particles at CERN? What if everyone had been as zealous as you are now about the existence of faster than light particles, and they had applied all manner of models to the data that it generated. What if the same people had repeated the experiment over and over, continuing to get the same result? What if the people who called for independent reviews had been called "denialists", and had their grant funding stripped? What if all science was run like climate science?
Please point me to the replicate initial measurement studies by independent sources.
Wow, what a waste of human existence you are.
Peak oil in a free market will have exactly as much effect on industry and society as peak charcoal did during the industrial revolution in England and continental Europe, and as much as peak whale oil had in the Eastern US. But we don't have a free market. We have what you fascist two-partiers have given us, a Department of Energy that has done everything in its power to increase reliance on foreign oil. A regulatory regime that has stopped nuclear dead in its tracks. Costly regulation that has ground our manufacturing base into dust even as free market reforms in China allowed the development of an industrial base large enough to supply the world with everything.
Also, your post is the longest fucking string of ad hominem I think I have ever seen. Why so much bile? Funny, I get called a liberal on one of the financial websites I visit. Some crazy racists even claimed I was black because I am anti-racism. Now here you are trying to conflate me with fucking David Duke because I recognize that AGW is dubious, and the "solution" is a thousand times worse than any possible problem that could come about from even the absolute worst case scenario. But hey, it's a quasi-free country (thanks to you and your fascist heros and their fascist pretend enemies), you can say what you want for now, as long as you don't say it where any government official can hear you, lol. Enjoy your banana republic, scumbag.
And yet the effects in mice are clear. Extreme increases in obesity when fed HFCS rather than table sugar. Empiricism trumps hand waving.
HFCS isn't in practically all forms of caloric food in Europe (yet). It is in America.
The lifestyles of Americans and other first-worlders aren't that different. People, given the same circumstances, aren't that different. The differences come from different circumstances. But people prefer to think that people they don't like are evil mutants.
People need justification to be skeptical of answers that don't make a lot of sense (or even those that do--as even the sensical answer is often the WRONG one) pending repeats of the study? Come the fuck on.
Only when your brain has been warped into thinking that this is the ultimate arbiter of price.
Measuring prices in dollars is like measuring length with a ruler that is continuously getting smaller. Here is a good allegory on the subject: http://www.constitution.org/tax/us-ic/schiff/moltz.pdf
The point is that they weren't right. Their numbers are not reflected by reality. Their "worst case" was too low, indicating that there was something wrong with their model.
I don't see why this article is news. Let's have a study of ALL of the climate change papers published between, say, 1971 and 1991. This reeks of cherry picking. In fact, it reminds me of a financial scam artist from a few years back. He would amass a giant email list, and send "market headed up" predictions to half, and "market going down" predictions to the other half. When the market went one way or another, he would them cut them in half again, and so on. After five or six iterations, he was able to totally convince a small subsection that he was totally right, and got them to pay him a huge amount of money for future predictions, whereupon everyone who paid lost huge amounts of money.
I love extrapolation.
http://xkcd.com/605/
Seriously, things don't go in a straight line forever. Further, they were quite totally wrong, in that their predictions were too low. I don't know what the big deal is, other than AGW people glorying in their own selection bias.
To some.
Politics is the Mind-Killer
Please mod parent up. This is a real and important point that the AGW community should address if they want to be taken seriously. More replicates never hurt.
Most people in atmospheric science rely on grants. Grant writers write what they think they want the reviewers to hear. More often than not, they are right.
Our system of government-funded science has created a perverse incentive (as government interventions are wont to do). This is undeniable. The only thing you can deny is the extent to which this effect has corrupted the system and the scientific community. I tend to think the corruption is widespread, but not 100%. Those who believe in global warming will tend to think that the corruption is minimal.
In my experience, it is usually the pessimist who is more right, and they are still too optimistic.
No, it won't. Stop talking out of your ass.
http://pricedingold.com/ They have many charts of commodity prices, many going back a hundred years. The trend over the time period is quite clear, where the prices of those things have generally fallen dramatically due to technological advance, while the trend over the last few years is sideways, while the prices of those things in dollars has gone up, up, UP, showing without a doubt that it is in fact the DOLLAR that is moving. You can tell that this is the case without even looking at money supply charts. If you did, your mind would recoil in horror, and you would either go into a catatonic state, or immediately move to a fortified mountain compound to wait "it" out.
Uh, no, he said that Malthus would have been correct (as in with his timing) but for a technological advance, but we're all still doomed because calories. lol, as if humans turned cranks to generators to produce light for plants, or as if we relied on food plants to produce fuel.
Peak oilers are as a group narcissists, basically death worshippers. They aren't interested in hearing about anything that goes against the central thesis of "we're all going to die in the next $arbitrarytimeperiod". It doesn't matter what new technologies you show them (I once had a POer try to tell me that the ECAT was fundamentally flawed, not because it was cold fusion pseudoscience, but because there is a limited amount of NICKLE IN THE EARTH. That is the mentality you are dealing with when you talk to these people. Talk about "weird".
Plants seem to have done fine gathering energy without using post peak minerals. And the minerals don't just vanish in current technologies. When the price goes high enough, they will simply be recycled.
Peak theorists, in general, have no clue how economics works. They only look at supply, rarely at demand, and NEVER at price.
You need to learn to tell the difference between private property and public property. Private property it traded between people at a prevailing market price, such that when a given material becomes scarce (read: oil), then the price goes up, driving demand down. WIth public property, there is no price, so demand is always infinite. Thugs will take EVERYTHING that they can. This is what happened in Easter Island. The Maya didn't collapse because there was no water, they WALKED AWAY because the priests were LYING TO THEM. They asked the people to sacrifice untold amounts of blood and living hearts to bring the rain, but the rain never came, so they just gave up.
You don't need any magic materials to have thorium reactors. You need a regulatory regime that doesn't "just say no" to anything with the word "nuclear" in it, and goes a step farther and doesn't "just say no" when you tell them you want to use a differnt type of reactor than what is currently used. It isn't the technology or the science that has held back thorium and other technologies, ITS THE GOVERNMENT.
Commodities have gone NOWHERE. Fiat currencies have gone DOWN. Challenges like this happens all the time. The English faced deforestation and "peak charcoal", but switched to a new process for smelting steel using coke, which wound up being more efficient, and allowed for another hundred years of industrial growth.
The Maya didn't reach peak anything--the most current thought is that they had a long drought and the people lost faith in their priests, so they walked away from their ceremonial city centers. They certainly didn't die. They are still there. And the Easter Islanders were barbarians who had no concept of land as property, so their thug chiefs took all the wood and used it to erect statues in their own honor. Peak theory had nothing to do with it. It's not like they were EATING the trees, or even using them for fuel.
Don't fall for the lies of the death cult. They have used the same ones for generations, and will continue to make the same ones for generations to come. The fact is that oil is only one source of energy, and it is rarely used as such. Its main uses are as energy dense fuel (which can be replaced with metal-air batteries or synthetic hydrocarbons), and as chemical feedstocks, which can be replaced with oil-producing plants and microorganisms. For ENERGY, there are many, MANY sources, the vast majority of which haven't been developed yet. Thorium can run the world for a thousand years. Probably long enough to get a few working fusion plants going. Hell, maybe long enough to figure out the secrets of creation.
If they are angry on "think of the children" grounds, then shouldn't they be mad about the fact that the characters are having SEX, not just that the characters are the same sex?
But no way, that would be . . . hypocritical!
Except that it is the same with ALL commodities. You really think all this shit "just happens" to be going on at the same time? Dr. House would call you an idiot. There is one root cause for this entire situation--central bank intervention in the markets.
Sure, like the "peak" in Russian oil production that "just happened" to coincide with the collapse of their state. Except, whoops, now their production is rising again.
When real demand falls, real production falls. Claiming that price has nothing to do with it is batshit insane. Price has EVERYTHING to do with it. But you want to ignore real price data because it runs counter to your hypothesis. This is something only zealots do. Stop being a zealot.
So when I turn off my kitchen faucet, I would be right to say "peak water is here!"?
No. Monetary manipulation is destroying the economy, which has lead to declining demand. Real costs of production in dollar terms are rising because the world is being flooded with dollars. Price oil in gold, and you will see what I mean. If oil really was becoming scarce, its real price would be rising. http://pricedingold.com/crude-oil/
Further, think about what you are saying here. You are denying the fact of technological progress. This flies in the face of every decade of the past 400 years. You think technological progress has peaked too? You think everything JUST HAPPENS to be shutting down RIGHT NOW, when YOU are here to make crazy predictions? You think the world is REALLY ending THIS time, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands of other times people have predicted the end?
Do you see the fundamental flaw in your thinking?
I think we have a candidate for "most fitting user name" right here.
When you don't have an argument, just use ad hominem!
Not money growing on trees, purchasing power growing on trees. That means you can take the money off of the trees, jam that crap into the ground, and whatever you want pops out, along with the money you jammed in there.
These people expect to be taken seriously, lol.