A Dashing Blade
Takes horses to water but can't make donkeys drink
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm, ok, how's about it's the one that sells gold right at the botom of the market?
Global financial system implosion begins
- Thread starter Falcon
- Start date
stethoscope
Well-Known Member
A Dashing Blade
Takes horses to water but can't make donkeys drink
It's not irony if you have to explain it
Tho' as a semi-serious point, I would imaging that Blair and his cohorts would describe themselves as democratic socialists . . .
stethoscope
Well-Known Member
Lol, keep trying...
It should be obvious that Gurning Gonad, like our other worthless politicians, are just puppets of money-juggling parasites, who have been planning for this implosion for over a decade. Let's get real: anyone with half a braincell should have realised years and years ago that a financial system dependent on perpetual growth on a finite planet is doomed to collapse. Any politician claiming to have abolished boom & bust is clearly wittering out of their egocentric asspipe. But nobody worried 'cos debt was cheap and there was a whole heap of shiny consumer distractions from the crash that was obviously coming - if you cared to look.
elbows
Well-Known Member
It's not irony if you have to explain it
Tho' as a semi-serious point, I would imaging that Blair and his cohorts would describe themselves as democratic socialists . . .
Who cares what they describe themselves as, they were neither democratic nor socialist.
gosub
~#
It's not irony if you have to explain it
Tho' as a semi-serious point, I would imaging that Blair and his cohorts would describe themselves as democratic socialists . . .
Given the amount of power they moved from the Parliament to the Executive, not particuarly democratic, and as the policies the implimented further increased the divide between the rich and poor, not particuarly socialist, but as they were lying self serving cunts who would say anything: "if you knew what I knew you'd invade"etc they may well describe themselves as "democratic socialists".
stethoscope
Well-Known Member
'Neo-liberal cunts' will do for me.
Still with the "money fetishism" "Money is an illusion, in a capitalist society it conceals the way PEOPLE relate unequally in a class-divided society to each other and share out resourcesvery unequally. So, for instace, when the financial speculators stole £billions out of the recent banking frenzy, they weren't just stealing "Money" for itself,but really stealing future labour power and resources which this "money" gives them the "right" to exchange for these real things. CAPITALISM can't operate for very long during each boom before a crisis of profitability occurs. Hence the underlying reason for the current world capitalist crisis. A socialist system in which "Money" wasn't just concealing vastly unequal ownership of land and productive resources, wouldn't be prey to such regular crisis. And NO I'm not talking about The Labour Party in office running a Capitalist economy as equalling Socialism, but a genuinely planned socialist society. If you don't grasp this you are so in the grip of commodity and money fetishism as to be lost to the world of economic reality. Try to see beyond Capitalism - it's only existed in a developed form for a couple of hundred years, and hopefully it won't be the final chapter in the Human Story.
Blair certainly wouldn't, Brown might have once.
JimW
支那暗杀团
IMF calls for collective action; if they're doing that does this mean it's our turn to call for a raft of measures that socialise capital's debts and sell off our assets?
free spirit
more tea vicar?
that's all well and good, but seeing as we currently live in a capitalist society, and it takes money to do anything significant, and I was being challenged on this country not having access to said finance, I'll not apologise for pointing out some significant sources of potentially available finance.
If you've some insider knowledge that the democratic socialist revolution is about to be upon us, please do share, otherwise you're just spouting meaningless bullshit, and I'll stick with what's capable of getting things done in the here and now.
ferrelhadley
There is no love between us anymore.
Any human political construct is an illusion.
As any first year student will be able to tell you after about 4 beers.
That could be right: money-jugglers were too busy with their snouts in the trough / cocaine bowl to plan anything coherently. They made obscene fortunes, leaving financial weapons of mass destruction scattered around on slow fuses. They then retired to some tropical tax-haven before TSHTF.
Vermin.
The
The point I was trying to make was that the current world capitalist crisis maybe can't be "solved" within the boundaries of the current way societies organise the allocation system for goods, services, rewards, . You are looking for a "solution" within the current system - but in previous crisis the "solutions" involved fascism and mass impoverishment and of course Stalinism. So sorry to go all Utopian and suggest this current set-up might not be the way to organise economics rationally -- but I'm not alone in this belief. Of course many "third-way" fascist theorists have a "soution too". If the crisis leads to another 1930's Depression we all may have to choose which radical options to support - rather than hoping a bit of tinkering will get us out of the current profound systemic mess.
The point I was trying to make was that the current world capitalist crisis maybe can't be "solved" within the boundaries of the current way societies organise the allocation system for goods, services, rewards, . You are looking for a "solution" within the current system - but in previous crisis the "solutions" involved fascism and mass impoverishment and of course Stalinism. So sorry to go all Utopian and suggest this current set-up might not be the way to organise economics rationally -- but I'm not alone in this belief. Of course many "third-way" fascist theorists have a "soution too". If the crisis leads to another 1930's Depression we all may have to choose which radical options to support - rather than hoping a bit of tinkering will get us out of the current profound systemic mess.
elbows
Well-Known Member
I see the BBC asked a bunch of people with a special interest in this stuff whether 'Western capitalism has failed'.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14972015
Quite a lot of the usual shit there from some, but I quite like much of what Chandran Nair has to say, and its quite a good fit for the way the conversation in this thread has gone in recent days. e.g. he says:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14972015
Quite a lot of the usual shit there from some, but I quite like much of what Chandran Nair has to say, and its quite a good fit for the way the conversation in this thread has gone in recent days. e.g. he says:
free spirit
more tea vicar?
I'm well aware of this, it's not my preferred economic model, and I've spent a good proportion of my life actively campaigning against it.
The reality of the situation though is that whether we like it or not, virtually the entire world is currently tied in to the WTO, which means that until the point that the WTO collapses, or is radically changed, no alternative is going to be able to emerge in any member country. Therefore, if we're discussing the potential for financing a major generational change in our energy supply to a largely renewables based system over the next decade, my starting point has to be where are the potential financing sources now, not how might we finance this come the revolution.
If / when the revolution happens, or even the current neoliberal capitalist economic and political model falls, i'll adjust my viewpoint accordingly.
Tbh though, I've nothing to do with that side of things, and pretty much stick to dealing with individual homeowners, I was merely pointing out that Falcon was wrong to make out the pensions industry didn't have the financial clout to fund much of this transition if they chose to.
Trainer demolishes every form of renewable energy.
http://www.springer.com/environment/book/978-1-4020-5548-5
Yes. See Trainer.
The scaling business is quite interesting and completely non-intuitive. If you take a mouse and scale it in size to an elephant, it would collapse under its own weight - the strength of its legs would increase with the square of the leg radius but the mass would increase with the cube of the body's (effective) radius. So it would collapse. Of course you could invest engineering time, money, energy and materials in strengthening the legs, but there is nothing obvious from the ambition to "scale a mouse" that this should be necessary and, besides, scaling is supposed to make things *more* efficient, not less, right? Engineering is littered with these types of problems.
So, for example. Take the infamous German Solar facility. Scale it to a square grid of dimension 100km (about the size you would need to make a material contribution to the global energy supply, absent hydrocarbon). If you can access, say, 0.5km either sided of a road for maintenance (inverter repair, panel cleaning, etc.), what length of road network would you need to service the array? Answer: about the same length as the Canadian road network. If you need X thousand barrels of oil per km of road to tar this network, how many million barrels of oil would you need? Answer: who cares - at $180/bbl, you can't afford it. What fraction of the grid's output is required to process that quantity of oil? To build the refinary for that oil? To build the vehicles necessary to service the grid? To build the factories in which the vehicles are manufactured? Answer: since you need ALL of the grid's output to do useful stuff - too much.
And so it goes.
So, for example. Take the infamous German Solar facility. Scale it to a square grid of dimension 100km (about the size you would need to make a material contribution to the global energy supply, absent hydrocarbon). If you can access, say, 0.5km either sided of a road for maintenance (inverter repair, panel cleaning, etc.), what length of road network would you need to service the array? Answer: about the same length as the Canadian road network. If you need X thousand barrels of oil per km of road to tar this network, how many million barrels of oil would you need? Answer: who cares - at $180/bbl, you can't afford it. What fraction of the grid's output is required to process that quantity of oil? To build the refinary for that oil? To build the vehicles necessary to service the grid? To build the factories in which the vehicles are manufactured? Answer: since you need ALL of the grid's output to do useful stuff - too much.
And so it goes.
elbows
Well-Known Member
I get the distinct impression that Trainer tries rather hard to do the demolition job, and leaves himself open to some legit criticism as a result. I'mm too tired to critique it properly right now but take this for example:
http://ssis.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/RE.html
There is more than enough there with which to start looking at his maths and assumptions. He looks to me like an interesting starting point, but I see him bemoaning a lack of studies & data on various important fronts, including the solar power issues raised here. So I doubt he can be used in quite the manner you are attempting here, he is not going to provide the clarity we need on these specifics. I expect he is of use more broadly, when wanting to think seriously about a variety of issues of scale, and where we go in future. But we really do have to factor in his obvious bias. There is a certain kind of transition and way of living that he is keen on, which no matter how much any of us may or may not agree with, no matter how sane it may be on certain levels, is rather likely to colour his thinking and I expect he is designing his maths to support this stance.
http://ssis.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/RE.html
There is more than enough there with which to start looking at his maths and assumptions. He looks to me like an interesting starting point, but I see him bemoaning a lack of studies & data on various important fronts, including the solar power issues raised here. So I doubt he can be used in quite the manner you are attempting here, he is not going to provide the clarity we need on these specifics. I expect he is of use more broadly, when wanting to think seriously about a variety of issues of scale, and where we go in future. But we really do have to factor in his obvious bias. There is a certain kind of transition and way of living that he is keen on, which no matter how much any of us may or may not agree with, no matter how sane it may be on certain levels, is rather likely to colour his thinking and I expect he is designing his maths to support this stance.
elbows
Well-Known Member
I think this illustrates how there is some talking at cross purposes here. You often seem to be talking about a world where the hydrocarbon game has reached its end-state. But we aren't at that stage, we are at the peak, not the final trickle.
And Im not quite sure why you seem so keen to paint the use of a percentage of a new energy sources output for infrastructure building as somehow being bonkers. I find examples where we scale one particular renewable plant up to a silly size to be unhelpful, but taking your 100km solar facility example, I don't know why you exclude factories, vehicles etc from being 'useful stuff'. Its not like all present uses of hydrocarbons are directed towards the bare basics of human life support.
Regardless, I do share some of your thoughts about scaleability, and under certain circumstances my quibbles about your sense of timescale & what stage we are at, how much wiggle room left etc, would be inapplicable. But if I look at the resources still available, its perfectly possible to use a good chunk of that to build a variety of things that will be fit for the future. And although if there is no spare energy capacity we can only do this by diverting resources away from other activities, these more useful infrastructure activities will still count as economic activity just the same. Then create a bunch of activities that are low-energy, and so still affordable to people, and let people spend more of their time 'consuming' that stuff instead of the high-energy stuff that we can no longer afford, in any sense of the word, to piss away for the sake of it, that is reserved for 'essentials'.
OK I would not bet anything on the current flavour of capitalism surviving past a certain stage of transition, but I could be making a fatal mistake if I thought that capitalism could not possibly find way to adapt and twist its way out of this situation. Including by means most horrific. For example is growth so alluring that certain capitalistic forces may end up actually desire it at any price, including some kind of strangely counter-intuitive (but familiar sounding) situation where a huge decline happens but this then provides a new lower starting point from which to grow again for quite some time, before hitting the buffers once more.
Bernie Gunther
Fundamentalist Druid
Um, I don't think he says that at all.
He clearly, and probably rightly, doesn't think we can do 'business as usual only sustainable' but I don't recall that he argues PV has a negative energy balance.
elbows
Well-Known Member
From that page I linked to, he seems keen to highlight these issues, but doesn't claim to know.
The problem with energy balance studies on the current crop of toy applications is they don't adequately consider scaling factors, since these scale factors are currently insignificant in relation to output at toy scale. They are not insignificant in material application, and increase with power law relationships. In the example above, assuming the 100km grid was the size necessary to support "the economy", then you would have to supply the additional energy necessary to manufacture the grid itself by expanding the grid itself. Assume 40% grid length increase. Then the grid size has doubled. You now need two Canadian road systems. So you need to expand the grid again to provide the energy for that (it's a recursive calculation asymptotic to some multiple of your original design value). Do this for all the subsystems (power export from the interior of the grid, control systems, etc.). These things simply do not scale.
I agree, but the thing we call "society" is not a linear construct we have designed - it is a non linear system which is the emergent property of the complex interaction of a number of codependent and unintuitive subsystems (the most critical safety component in a nuclear facility, for example, is a stable society). The behaviour of such systems subject to transients in their inputs is properly described by chaos theory, which shows us that such systems change state rapidly and out of all proportion to the magnitude of the change in the input variable - in this case, energy availability. It is a mistake to imagine that a system that depends for stability on an expanding quantity will enter some state of gentle decline as that quantity enters a state of gentle decline (or in this case, rapid decline). Many systems are at their most sensitive at the point of inflexion of a variable (e.g. Peak) rather than the asymptotic point of that variable (e.g. Exhaustion).
The spare capacity in the energy system enjoyed until 2008 provided a degree of freedom (in the control theory sense of the word) which is now absent - now the system is hard coupled to the diminishing offtake rate and the effect is rather like going round a bend in a car with a jammed rack and pinion limiting the turn radius. I'm sure you can imagine that the crash is not gentle and continuous, despite the relatively small limitation - same thing.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Im not expecting anything gentle. I simply question the timescales, for example given that we've already been in this financial crisis phase for more than a couple of year now, how do I know we won't stumble along in this state for a number of years to come before anything more acute occurs?
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't be shocked if things failed at any moment, but Im always aware that if I had been an adult during the 1970's instead of just being born then, I could have strongly bought into the prevailing sense of woe that they decade brought, expecting imminent collapse, but I would have had a long wait.
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't be shocked if things failed at any moment, but Im always aware that if I had been an adult during the 1970's instead of just being born then, I could have strongly bought into the prevailing sense of woe that they decade brought, expecting imminent collapse, but I would have had a long wait.
By the 70's Hubbert had already predicted peak oil for the end of the 20th century (he was only out because of the decoupling of Saudi oil from the global petroleum system, and that added only 10 years to his prediction). It took 90 years to build oil infrastructure - 30 years to build its replacement using technologies of fractional net energy was not "a long wait" - it would have been "just in time if not too late".
Replace "bought into the prevailing sense of woe" with "taken the threat seriously and done something about it" and, if our parents had done so, we would be in better shape now. Instead, we ignored it.
And here we are with our own generation of unwarranted optimists, confusing our historical capacity to create technology from surplus energy with an ability to make surplus energy from technology (one of the worst examples of causality reversal fallacies in our history), lulling everyone into a false sense of security and preventing us from taking the necessary action.
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