Mish posted an interesting video the other day, another TED-talk by Andrew McAfee. it is an example of how far down the technology rabbit hole we’ve traveled. McAfee’s idea is that robots are going to take everyone’s jobs … but this will be alright! We’ll be ‘free’ (from hated jobs, money, etc.) Insert buzzword here:
McAfee is a shill for the computer/telephone industry. He has cleverly put the wind to his back and proselytizes for the job-eradication industry. It’s actually a safe job! In the process he promises all sorts of abstract benefits that are certain to arrive ‘tomorrow’ …
Humans are suckers, we always wind up believing the promises. We really have no choice, we’ve become desensitized and can no longer imagine alternatives to mechanized mass-marketed ‘prosperity’ other than ‘Third Reich’, ‘Mad Max’ or ’40 acres and a mule’.
Technologists: it’s always tomorrow with these people. Tomorrow’s benefits are essential to overcome the baleful consequences of yesterday’s benefits. Tech is the ultimate tail-chasing exercise, nobody gets anywhere except unemployed. The outcome is a deeper and deeper capital hole that can never be dug out of. Here is McAfee in his own words:
About Andrew McAfee
Andrew McAfee studies the ways that information technology (IT) affects businesses and business as a whole. His research investigates how IT changes the way companies perform, organize themselves, and compete. At a higher level, his work also investigates how computerization affects competition, society, the economy, and the workforce.
He and Erik Brynjolfsson are co-authors of the ebook “Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy”. The book brings together a range of data, examples, and research to show that the average US worker is being left behind by advances in technology.
He coined the phrase “Enterprise 2.0” in a spring 2006 Sloan Management Review article to describe the use of Web 2.0 tools and approaches by businesses. He also began blogging at that time, both about Enterprise 2.0 and about his other research. McAfee’s blog is widely read, becoming at times one of the 10,000 most popular in the world (according to Technorati).
Industrialization concentrates employment within manufacturing centers and has done so since the Industrial Revolution: in this sense nothing has changed for hundreds of years. Machines are the instruments of the pillage economy: as long as there are fossil fuels to power machines there will be machines stealing human jobs. Machines cost less to operate, they never go on strike, never complain or fail to perform. If a particular machine is balky it is repaired or thrown away and replaced without concern. Machines are collateral, they can be debt-subsidized, humans workers cannot. The machine-dynamic is self-amplifying, reflecting the desires (greed) of machines’ owners. If one owner doesn’t have job-pillaging machines, his competitors obtain them and destroy his business. Technological advancement is the essence of ‘ruinous competition’.
According to McAfee, machines will labor so we won’t have to. Nothing is said about how the great bulk of the world’s citizens will entertain themselves absent jobs. Undertow has mentioned this before: the greatest shortage in the world right now is not one of resources or water or fossil fuels, rather it is a shortage of interesting, useful things for people to do! As the late, great Charles Bukowski said, you can only fuck once a day, what do you do the rest of the time? A: drink. Who makes the beverages? A: robots.
McAfee:
I am personally still a huge digital optimist, I am supremely confident that the digital technologies that we’re developing now are going to take us into a utopian future … not a dystopian future … and to explain why I want to pose kind of a ridiculously broad question. I want to ask what had been the most important developments in human history? No single answer to it … what does the data say? The Industrial Revolution …
The bottom of the pyramid is benefitting hugely from technology … the economist Robert Jenson did this wonderful study a while back, where he watched in great detail what happened to the fishing villages of Kerala, India, when they (?) got mobile phones for the very first time. And when you write for the Quarterly Journal of Economics, you have to use very dry and very circumspect language … but when I read his paper I kind of feel Jensen is trying to scream at us and say … ‘Look, this was a big deal, prices stabilized’ … so people could plan their economic lives (!). Waste was not reduced … it was eliminated! And the lives of both the buyers and the sellers in these villages … measurably improved.
The ‘droids are taking our jobs … but, focusing on that fact misses the point entirely. The point is that then we are freed up to do other things. And what we are going to do, I am very confident, what we are going to do is reduce poverty and drudgery and misery around the world …
What is there not to like about cute little ‘droids?
Readers can come to their own conclusions about Jensen’s paper which measures the impact of cell phones on independent fishermen and their customers on the Arabian seacoast of southern India. The fishermen and customers use the phones to discover where the best price might be had for fish as well as who has fish available for sale. What Jensen does not examine in parallel is the efficiencies of other, simpler technology such as VHF- or citizens’ band radios which do not need the massive network infrastructure of the cell phones. Jensen is a rationalizer for the expanding ‘growth’ status quo, the paper is filled with the usual econometric gibberish. What matters most is excluded from it by design: the cost of the network technology in its entirety against the best possible returns of the users.
Cell phones are a billion-dollar solution to a thousand dollar problem. The only way the phones can exist in the first place is when the entire country takes on the debts needed to construct the platform and keep it running. Fishermen are subsidized by everyone else: costs are smeared across the network, the fishermen by themselves cannot hope to pay for anything other than their own handsets and (limited) access. Creditors provide the funds and put future generations on the hook for repayment. Whether the enterprise supports itself is irrelevant because the (expanding) infrastructure — not the customer base — is collateral for (expanding) loans. Once constructed the infrastructure is self-supporting in that it is ‘too big to fail’: it will be bailed out as needed by the government in the form of central bank credit or government guarantees for private sector loans.
McAfee argues the medium matters more than the content itself. This is nothing new, television has been around for decades. The result is smart (chic) transmission means with users having little or nothing to say: smarter machines and dumber operators. The medium marginalizes any content that does not acknowledge the supremacy of the medium in a self-amplifying cycle. Even as ‘progress’ is busy cannibalizing itself, content which might break the cycle is shunted to the margins. Technology is a form of information rationing: fashionable content which supports the fashionable medium is transmitted. Anything else is deemed hopelessly old fashioned and is safely ignored.
The robots steal peoples’ jobs until the cheap energy that drives them becomes too costly. Robots become stranded capital, then recyclable junk. Ironically, the cheap energy is disappearing because there are too many robots! Technology requires a large supply of refined, concentrated energy along with a hyper-complex infrastructure of interrelated robots, to provide the desired services and to keep itself operating. Links in the system don’t have to break, they only to become unaffordable which strands the other links. Once gasoline becomes too costly, the marginal driver vanishes. Once he’s gone so goes the new car industry: without cheap fuel there are too-few gasoline users to support the massive enterprise.
Consider the fishermen in Kerala: efficient fish-pillagers become more successful than others over the short term. They gain subsidies to purchase high-performance fishing boats that allow them to exploit the fishery more completely than their competitors. There are diminishing marginal returns on technology: increasing the efficiency of the fishermen does not increase the fishery but diminishes it. At some point the fishery collapses from over-exploitation, leaving the fishermen turning to the government for a bailout. At the end of the day there is no fishery, little- or no fishing at all … the boats sit idle and corrode. Fishermen are out of work and cannot afford their cell phones without turning the girls in their families out into the street as whores. Gone forever is a thousand-year enterprise of fishing from small boats along with the communities that the unfashionably inefficient fishing once supported. The villages become concrete-block ‘resorts’: the fisherman, undone by their own technology, are hustled off to slums within sprawling mega-cities. The apologists for modernity rationalize for these things too.
The ‘cost error’ is fatal. Because machines cannot pay for themselves by way of the their use, they must be paid for with borrowed ‘money’ which itself is the ‘Mother Of All Innovations’. Most of the gadget-finagling of the past thirty or so years has nothing to do with actual improvements to machines but are restatements/reconfigurations of pre-existing versions. Innovation has taken the form of ‘money tricks’ that conjure more credit against non-existent collateral and discursive processes that make it easier for asset managers to steal from their customers. Because of the success of previous innovations and diminishing returns, the thefts are naked, the thieves desperate. They have pillaged too well for too long: there is only so much remaining … that isn’t bolted down.
Nobody asks the question, where do the thieves go with the loot? Lifeboats from the Titanic are picked up by other Titanics careering into icebergs. The passage of time and repetition of the lifeboat/sinking process also has diminished returns. The amount of work to be done conforms to available resources: at some point there is one lifeboat and a relative handful of passengers, this is what the resources will support over an extended period.
The basic idea is our mechanized economy isn’t productive enough to support all the demands made against it.
To the technologist, the obvious solution to our crisis is to deploy more machines so as to eliminate the productivity shortfall. Besides the techies, this is the argument of the so-called ‘free market’ types keep making over and over. Give us more productivity (machines), ‘innovation’ (machines), ‘entrepreneurs’ (machines) and old time religion (hard currency) and there will be paradise tomorrow!
The flip side of the argument is that everything but the machines must be sacrificed or tomorrow will be a disaster! To satisfy technology, our parents are tossed into the furnace their pensions are stolen. Payments to the seniors must be suspended or nothing will remain for machines (with real numbers to prove it). Of course the children and the grand-children were consumed a long time ago. There is nothing left, the machines have burned it all, what remains is to take what little capital remains, feed that into the fire then jump in after it!
Analysts wail because the US Social Security Trust fund is underwater with not a word is said about every other aspect of modernity that has drowned first. Real money/capital has been shoveled down the rathole for decades. It was given over for fuel put into our precious toys that never earned a dollar!
The country (countries) have been ruined while a handful of well-positioned criminals have enriched themselves. What else is there to show for the trillion$ simply extinguished? Those who want waste need only look to the ends of their driveways! Look to the insides of houses! Look at any automobile slum, any monstercity with hulking tombstone concrete towers that must be fed with rivers of petroleum every single day or else.
The way to solve the problems in the USA right now … along with those of China, Europe, Japan and the rest of the world is to shed the autos and leave the seniors and the kids alone. Instead, everything in sight — pensions, education, health care, privacy and civil liberties — are thrown into the fire in order to keep driving. This is madness!
Pauperization is a world-wide phenomenon: too many humans, too many machines, no return on the use of the machines. We love our machines, we will never let them go …
Phantom returns (from the machines) are actual claims levied against humans (and the rest of nature). Machines ‘prosper’ because humans starve (and capital is wiped out). The bosses say, “No problem! There are increasing numbers of humans, we can afford to sacrifice some of them (as the payment for my getting rich).”
When the machine-feeding system breaks down the outcome is Greece … then Yemen. Coming up is Spain then China and others … into the pauperization meat grinder. Higher input costs multiply exponentially through the system … whatever kind of system you have. In the end, nobody can afford what the system needs to function. The next step is shortages … which are permanent.
As fuel becomes more expensive, machines are fired and humans replace them: ruinous competition doesn’t follow any rules but its own! The entire machine-paradigm of expanding work, expanding machines, of expanding labor productivity and expanding marketplaces requires expanding capital to consume or it shifts into reverse. The amount of work to be done conforms to available resources. McAfee says nothing about ‘hyper-ruinous competition’ where tech competes with itself for diminished inputs.
The largest industrial input is petroleum. Regardless of production or reserves, Peak Oil occurred in 1998, when a barrel of Saudi crude cost less than $10. Price matters, nothing else. More costly crude strands all of world’s fuel wasting infrastructure. Even massive extensions of credit, public and private, cannot bring the cost of petroleum within reach even as credit has its own unbearable costs.
Pauperization is taking place right now in real time right under everyone’s noses. For this the technologists have no answer because there is none … What is needed is a complete change of thinking and attitude, a look beyond the mass technology magic mirror and toward functioning ways of living that demand more of the citizens than to be fashion slaves.
Steve,
Don’t worry! Electricity through nuclear fusion will power all of the machines while we fuck and drink.
And chart…
The aporia and tautologia are persuasive, Steve. Your central restatements about fuel and autos have been gaining clarity, yet you hold out more hope for reasoned solutions than your own arguments allow. I admire this.
If your readers have to do without tv and cars, a next step is computers, but no readers for you then!
About the reaction when oil shortages really affect American daily lives, there’s this from 1975, from :56 through about 1:30.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9w3E3eFMsLg&feature=watch_response
What might Americans want when they’re stranded in their suvs? To learn how to do without, or to lash out in their impotence? Polling news this week, 25% want to use nuclear bomb against terrorists:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/09/25/torture_creep
The goal here is to make it to paper.
Once the Undertow has safely reached paper it will be time to pull the plug on the micro-TV. I actually cannot wait.
Paper has been around for 3000+ years so there should be no problems with it …
Why stop at paper — an industrial product. Oral traditions transmitted culture and knowledge for countless millennia before writing was even known. One could argue that written transmission is a necessary condition for the breakdown of local community, though it does admittedly facilitate the creation of broader, and long lived intellectual communities that often get mired in abstractions. But coming to the amphitheatre with one’s fellow citizens to hear of the trials and travels of Odysseus, or to church to hear about the agonies of Christ, or just dance to the drumb beats of the tribe — these strike me as the stuff that would help create and sustain a community. (Just an abstract thought for consideration. Plato took a dim view of the written form by the way. Perhaps some one more scholarly than me can find the chapter and verse … I think it was in The Republic)
The definitive attack on writing by Plato was in the dialogue “Phaedrus.” Brilliant, a must-read.
please just make sure it’s made from hemp.
The epitome of waste for waste’s sake — auto racing — driving around in a closed loop at high speeds for the sheer thrill of reckless endangerment and burning high grade gasoline as rapidly as possible. Apparently Greece now thinks it’s a good time to build a F1 track even as Germany’s most famous track declares bankruptcy…
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-10-01/legendary-nurburgring-files-bankruptcy-broke-greece-launches-its-own-formula-1-race-
Reason has been set the purpose of swallowing its own tail. Cognitive dissonance is a closed loop. The immediacy of severe and abrupt pain (loss of life, limb, or credit) is often the only means of interrupting the circuit. Shortages must arrive and persist. Until then, status quo. After all, the icebergs are melting, so why worry?
Along the same lines see this from Scientific American.
http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=63&ms=Mzk3OTYyNjAS1&r=NTY1MTQ5OTIxOAS2&b=0&j=MTYxMjA0NzI4S0&mt=1&rt=0
Anything to keep the size, speed and power no matter the cost and futility. This is why I dropped my subscription several years ago.
The Greeks probably won’t build anything … money will be siphoned off.
We’re seeing the result of a world run by moneylenders and merchants. Not such a good job for them.
Maybe they can be replaced by ‘droids!
I forget which historian pointed out that the invention of the printing press arrived shortly after the Black Death had killed off a third of Europe’s population and left mountains of old clothes and rags that could be turned into paper.
This time around the plastic fibers may not be so easy to process into paper but there will be plenty of cotton and wool.
g
Steve, are you moving towards Fuller’s Anticipatory Design Science? Fuller concluded 50 years ago that most of humanity had absolutely no material obligation to work for physical survival. Industrial society and especially this bullshit iterative “post-industrial” society is a massive make-work scheme. If everyone had time to think about the absurdity of the system, as you have, they’d have torn it all down and burnt it yesterday.
The world of work….. in the 1970s.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFIInroycgc
“Its the pigs isn’t it “
You forgot Clan of the Cave Bear. 😀
I gather you have another alternative in mind other than the 4 listed here. I also gather if every one stops driving this alternative can be implemented and we can keep the lights on and sewage treatment plants running in the population centers and ship enough food into these places to keep the people from cannibalizing each other.
Can you flesh out how this is going to work?
RE
Doomstead Diner
All depends on how fast the petro runs out. If the decline is gradual enough, human beings have proven themselves to be quite adaptable creatures and will adjust with few lives lost. A rapid fall off would probably kill a billion people, mostly because of local shortages in poor regions brought about because richer regions weren’t ready to stop living the “good life” yet.
On the bright side, we still have natural gas and coal. They won’t run cars, but they will run trains and keep houses warm. Suburbia would be gone though. Most of the world would wind up looking like New York City. Some people like that kind of life. I don’t happen to. Had to sell both of my cars. My entire family still hasn’t stopped bitching at me (sigh). Having done it, I don’t think the average person would ever willingly give up his car(s). It will have to be forced on him.
The first step is we have to start telling ourselves and each other the truth.
Every bit of modernity is built on a foundation of lies, more lies make up the girders and columns of the structure, the structure supports even more lies.
What use is something that requires falseness in order to even exist?
What comes next is a crapshoot.
How old are you, Steve? I think you must be over 40. Young people (at least the ones I know) are more hopeful. Sure the fisherman’s village is cemented, the huge boats stranded, everyone is generally f%#!ed but still, farther away, some tiny place, some tiny remote place keeps up the old tradition and a son or daughter returns home there to fish quietly without gasoline because all the other options are dead. It isn’t 100% failure, a few escape the gaping maw!!
Check out the “Secret of Shakespeare” slideshow on slideshare.com and see why “Juliet is the sun”. Shakespeare had hope that things would change back one day. Don’t despair.
I hope somebody escapes the gaping maw … but to guarantee it requires people to stand up the maw and fight it. To fight it is to defeat it.
Right now, folks don’t understand we are at the fighting point. They believe the shills and ‘get with the program’ and add their support for the status quo. They do this because they don’t understand or they are afraid of alternatives. Those who understand where we are don’t know how to fight effectively and are hopelessly disorganized.
They never had to fight effectively or organize themselves because the ‘system’ could take care of them to some degree. In the past, fighting always meant taking another’s place within the system, not battling the system itself. Our current situation is novel: it’s a fight against ourselves and our ‘perceived’ interests because to a large degree, we are the system.
The realization of the need to fight is the parallel realization of personal responsibility. In other words, taking responsibility = fighting the system.
Ran Prieur recently linked to this essay: http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/.
The essay is amazingly logical, but I think it winds up in about the same place Steve did. The writer assumes that increasing automation will wipe out most jobs in the mid-term future, a perfectly defensible assumption given the evidence, and then speculates from there.
Essentially the world will either become more hierarchical or more egalitarian. Resources will either be more abundant or more scarce. These possibilities intersect into four futures, so the essay looks at how automation and the disappearance of jobs intersect with each. Of course readers of this blog probably have a good guess about which of the four possibilities the world is headed to.
Automate away most jobs, and the elite have for choices as to what to do with the surplus labor. The first option is to exterminate the brutes. The second option is to create lots of make-work jobs, essentially to keep people occupied and under control and to keep money circulating. The third option is a hippie-communist thing where the masses are given a guaranteed income, though it may have to come with the condition of limiting family size.
But they will have to pick one of the three. I think an attempt will be made to create a sufficient amount of make-work. If the elite tries for the “rentier future” discussed in the four futures essay, they will have to pay people for make-work to recycle the money back to themselves as rent. Kurt Vonnegut explored this back in the 1950s (!) with his underrated novel “Player Piano” and the partially-successful solution was make-work combined with welfare.
Player Piano – one of my favorite books. Vonnegut continued to understand the dilemma right up until the time of his death.
Our future is Orwell’s 1984. An age of austerity with a never-ending leadership and a citizenry with no clue about their fate and place in the world manufactured by their elites.
Oh, and continual war, too.
Economics is a religion based on faith. That paper starts out with mention of the Holy Ghost, i.e., Saint Pareto.
As Jay Hanson says, ” Economists base their political program on several known-false assumptions, which lead to a focal belief called ‘Pareto optimality.’ ‘Pareto optimality’ is not scientific because it is not defined in a way that can be falsified. ‘Pareto optimality’ is a belief in the same sense as ‘Christ died for our sins’ is a belief—neither can be falsified. Economists proselytize for their doctrinal beliefs like Christian missionaries proselytize for theirs.”
source: http://dieoff.org/
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“The basic idea is our mechanized economy isn’t productive enough to support all the demands made against it.”
The TRUTH is that Societies can’t devote energy to the non-productive… for long.
The next up-coming job *BOOM* – changing the diapers of the elderly…
“6:29PM EST October 2. 2012 – As Baby Boomers age into retirement by the millions each year, their growing health care needs require more people to administer that care.”
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2012/10/02/healthcare-job-growth/1600255/
Stop trying to blame “the elites” or other wacky conspiracy theories. It’s the Socialist concept of large-scale retirements, inter-generational wealth transfer schemes like Socialist Security, Medi-Scare, Property Taxes, Income taxes, Subsidized housing, or whatever….
The blame lies squarely on those who believe in the lie that exponential growth is possible in a resource limited world. The Boomers are all chasing 7 – 8% annual returns, and damn those who would get in their way… hence they move jobs to overseas where slave wages are paid and eco-systems destroyed. They want their precious stock portfolios to return unrealistic returns – so they look the other way when the lackeys they place in charge force austerity on their workers while they pay themselves big$$$$.
What we have here is an intergenerational war which is being waged by the Boomers and WWII generation against the young – and the young need to start “pulling the plug” and stop wasting resources keeping unproductive bodies alive.
Machines are unproductive, they enable more ‘unproductivity’ (Marginal dis-utility as by Keynes). Also enabled are additional unproductive bodies, this is the machines’ purpose, to create more ‘things’ like themselves. As the machines create ‘more’ they compress everything down to their own level so that there is no distinction to be made between human and non-human.
Hate to break it, but the economy is the property of those who own it: every aspect of it serves the owners’ purposes. The ordinary citizens do not own the economy they are its subjects. They are given the illusion of ownership of bits and pieces of it, there is the sensation of power and its (false) trappings while the owners have the real power of ownership over the economies’ subjects.
Machines are less productive than ‘bodies’ unless you can somehow suspend the laws of thermodynamics. Humans like machines because they are ‘fun’: they distract us from our condition as property. We rationalize the machines, to do otherwise requires that we first acknowledge our place in the world as slaves. Instead of doing so, we remove as many limits as possible on machines rather than make sensible rules to govern them.
Machines are ‘productive’ in the sense that they make ‘products’ — items of interest/use to humans. They can transform matter in ways that the human body by itself cannot. Thermodynamics is beside the point, except in the long-term. Even if we concede that the machines are getting too expensive to run and are a net energy drain on the system, certain machines can still be productive, within the parameters defined by the needs of the system (eg oil refineries that make diesel to run trucks to deliver food to people that cannot grow their own).
It depends on one’s aims whether or not machines are more or less ‘productive’ or even whether ‘productivity’ itself is important. Steve’s comment here is insightful. Yet humans in their present form consistently choose ‘fun’ or ‘pleasure’ over ‘freedom’ or ‘responsibility’. It seems that physical conditions must fundamentally change in order to facilitate the kind of revaluation that Steve calls for. ‘Fighting the system’ happens when people have nothing left to invest in it, when death is a welcome alternative.
Mmm, hmmm:
No news for readers, here … People can’t afford the higher prices and there are shortages. Prices are both too high (for customers to afford) and too low (to bring new gasoline to the market) at the same time.
To end the shortages in California, they will be necessary elsewhere. Spain?
From the article:
“The real question is: How long is this going to last and what can the state do?”
Can the state grant a temporary waiver of the RVP limits and remain in compliance with EPA regulations? Given the choice between driving and breathing clean(er) air, we know what they’ll choose. As the noose tightens, perhaps we’ll see a pattern of failure to comply with federal regulations emerge.
We’ll find out in a couple of weeks if switching to the winter grade alleviates the shortage. Otherwise, the machines will sit idle.
This is the ‘blame the hippie-environmentalist’ trope instead of the ‘rationing by price works until it stops’ variety.
Tropes work until they doesn’t any more, either. You have gas or you don’t.
What you say is true: a lot of what people will call ‘gasoline’ in the future will be a sludgy, watery compound that might or might not burn if a lit match is applied to it. Getting gas at all will be an adventure as well.
This is from a New York Times article about Yemen during its ‘Spring’, a condition soon to be imitated across Western Europe:
$6/liter is almost $25/gallon: that was the ‘official’ subsidized price: how would that price structure work in the US? A: it wouldn’t, there would be no mass car industry. Nobody would pay that price.
This is what happens when everything depends on everything else: small failures are magnified. The machines sit idle, for some the state of affairs becomes permanent.
Steve said: “This is what happens when everything depends on everything else: small failures are magnified.”
Indeed. It seems a little scheduled maintenance, a fire back in early August, and a power outage = no gas.
“At the Shell station at Greenback Lane and Auburn Boulevard in Citrus Heights, Rhonda Taylor filled the four-door family sedan and shook her head: “Where does it end? We’re already talking about trading in for a (Toyota) Prius or something that gets that kind of gas mileage. This is just taking money out of our pockets … money we need for other things.”
http://www.sacbee.com/2012/10/04/4879836/analysts-gas-prices-likely-to.html
I guess everyone has seen this by now: “Is Shale Oil Production from Bakken Headed for a Run with “The Red Queen”?
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9506
At $80-90/b the ‘narrow ledge’ is becoming a ‘tightrope’ mighty fast. – Thanks, Steve.
We are racing the red queen elsewhere: our country’s energy policy is to bankrupt our trading partners by cutting off credit so that they cannot afford fuel. What if they don’t fall apart fast enough?
Michael Klare has a relevant article about ‘extreme energy’ that covers this subject as well”
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175601/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_extreme_energy_means_an_extreme_planet/
“What if they don’t fall apart fast enough?”
Then we can’t use the refinery bottleneck excuse anymore. Bush tried this in 2005:
http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=31333
That idea didn’t go very far:
http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=29&t=6
We’ll need something or someone else to blame. What would be…..’fashionable?’
This California shortage seems to be a refinery bottleneck. If shortages persist, will this lead to the nationalization and/or direct subsidization of major oil refineries, both here and in Europe?
Refiners have problems making a profit when crude prices are high(er). Some sort of public subsidy will be in order if they aren’t in effect, already.
Amazing fact !!!!!
http://www.simi.ie/
(see news at right of page ,new car sales in September)
The BMW 3 was the biggest selling Irish car in September (130 units sold) !
781 units were sold (Jan – Sep) of which 770 were diesel and 11 petrol !
Of the total BMWs sold in Ireland this year (Jan -Sep ) a amazing 3,236 were diesel and 38 petrol !
This diesel thing is going too far as many people drive very very short distances in and around urban areas.
The much more modest but practical small car Volks “UP” 1 litre petrol (launched in Feb 2012) is not selling very well in Ireland for some reason. (248 units)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Up
A total of 9,700 Volks was sold in Ireland during 2012.
There seems to be a much greater division between the haves whose sometimes large deposits is a product of the previous credit hyperinflation and the have nots who buy second hand cars if at all.
The small cheap new petrol car market seems almost dead in Ireland.
Sorry , the Toyota Yaris dominates the small Irish 1 litre petrol segment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Vitz
With 1,908 units sold out of a total of 3,175 units (Jan to Sep)
Volks UP : 248
Opel Corsa : 240
Kia Picanto : 186
Toyota AYGO :124
Skoda citigo : 69
The Irish new Car market is showing all the signs of a Cash market with some holding much more cash then others and buying what they consider to be the best.
Despite a 12 % drop in sales from last year (Jan – Sep ) Audi is doing OK
Y2010 : 2,796
Y2011 : 3,317
Y2012 : 3,577
With a 50 % increase in the large prestige segment with 703 units sold in the Jan -sep 2011 period and 1,052 units sold in 2012.
And 527 Jeep /SUV prestige Audis in Y2012 rather then the 203 units in Y2011
There is no accounting for taste I guess , the very good design of the Toyota IQ seems to have been lost on the nouveau riche of Ireland who hold a huge amount of buying power in this Titanic Deflation.
With only 14 units sold in Ireland so far this year.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU_cYdfKjAc
People want this (albeit the Diesel model)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_knUNb4VAc0
I guess this is the NAMA company men and some others.
The guys managing legacy “assets”.
Entropy engineers.
PS
The truely Absurd Nissan Qashqai
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Qashqai
is the number 2 top selling “car” model in Ireland so far this year with 3,256 units sold (2,611 Jan -Sep Y2011)
Who the hell is buying these capital & fuel intensive cars ?
Back in the early 80s depression people were buying cheap 1 litre petrol cars…..
We are truely living withen a non optimum monetary envoirment where we import useless stuff which on a holistic level extracts from rational domestic demand.
Given the circumstances half of the new car regs should be 1 litres…..but it is a tiny niche market with more Qashquis sold then the entire 1 litre segment !!!
Steve , this Iran thing…………
Using the BP data you can see how their internal oil consumption has declined somewhat
Y2009 : 1,923 TBD (peak)
Y2011 : 1,824 TBD
Still bigger then France 1724 TBD by 100TBD
But perhaps the above decline was a result of a switch from oil to Gas for elec. generation….
This recent 40 percent depreciation of the Iranian rial these past few weeks will reduce car use for sure…..forcing the export of more oil out of the country….
But a much bigger consumer of oil is Saudi Arabia despite its much smaller pop (although unlike Iran they buy mostly western products)
Y2001 : 1,622 TBD
Y2009 : 2,555 TBD
Y2011 : 2,856 TBD
Now a much bigger oil consumer then Germany
Y2001 : 2,787 TBD
Y2009 : 2,409 TBD
Y2011 : 2,362 TBD
The dynamics of this is quite violent to say the least.
This guy did not get your memo…….he wants it all it seems….
twitter.com/adelaigue/statuses/254290552382709760
Steve from Virginia:
“Credit money expansion (Banks) replaces a great debt with another, greater debt. There is never a net reduction in the debt, only a perpetual increase. (we are reducing our debt by exporting our debt/symbolic wealth via goods- export elsewhere destroying internal commerce)
Treasury money expansion is repudiation of debts => repudiation of (pre-existing) money, institutionalized default (expansion includes purposeful inflation).
Finance offers fiat debt then demands repayment in circulating currency (gold clause effect). Fiat currency offered by the government to retire fiat debt: both the debt and the currency are extinguished at once.
The creditor says, “You owe us, you must pay with circulating money!”
The debtor says, “There is no circulating money, the creditors refuse to lend …”
The creditor says, “We will seize your property instead and destroy your economy!”
The government (which is also a debtor) says:
– “We will create money without borrowing and repay the loans as they come due. We can do this because we are the government, our money is paid to our army.”
– “The loans are fiat — they were created by the lender with the stroke on a keyboard, they were not made from circulating currency. To act as if they were is a crime, a false claim. The lenders will be repaid by a stroke of the keyboard, in the same form as the debts were issued. If you or other lenders touch our property or our citizens we will throw you into prison and decide later whether to feed you or not.”
– “Because lenders have impoverished our country with endless false claims we will punish you severely whenever we can get our hands on you. You are our enemy and we will destroy you if we can, because you have sought to destroy us!”
Taiwan looks much like a Asian Ireland – once the darling of international capital, now not so much, becoming politically isolated etc etc …
Its energy balance looks terrible (2009)
http://www.iea.org/stats/pdf_graphs/TWTPES.pdf
with only limited domestic Nuke production for the most part
Since then its oil consumption has tanked…..down 7.5% in one year from 1,028TBD in Y2010 to 951 TBD in Y2011
“Taipei, Oct. 5, 2012 (CENS)–The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has recently halved its economic growth forecast for Taiwan this year to 1.7% from 3.4% predicted in April and slashed the corresponding figure for 2013 to 3.8% from 4.6%”
Its gas consumption (LNG growth) is up by a big amount since 2009 keeping the place afloat
Y2009 : 10.2 MToe
Y2010 : 12.7 MToe
Y2011 : 14.0 mtoe (10.1% growth Y2010 -2011)
But the IEA has issued a very loud LNG warning by its standards
“For LNG, a web of vulnerability” – No Shit Sherlocks
http://www.iea.org/
How could you create and sanction such a vulnerable system unless you wish to destroy it?
It seems such a bitter and sad country with no colour …
This video of their new high speed train is very 1984-ish with a blank grey slate hanging over this non-place.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBHJt2ZzuQ4
Trying to figure out why BMW only really sell Diesel cars in Ireland now.
Finance of course…..they only seem to offer credit for their BMW 1 & 3 series diesel…….
So the BMW stuff at least for the 1 & 3 series is not cash , with the6 & 7 series sales very low in Ireland.
http://www.bmw.ie/ (BMW Ireland)
It may be hard for Americans to understand the scale of diesel use.
http://www.simi.ie/
Y2007 (Jan -Sep) BMW sales Petrol :3,690 , Diesel : 3,320
Y2012 (Jan – Sep) BMW sales Petrol : 38 ,Diesel : 3,236
So they are simply refusing to give credit for petrol cars given their generally higher tax band and higher fuel use especially in these heavy high powered cars.
Low income people are not given credit of any description , therefore you get a very unusual car market of high end sales and lower relative basic car sales.
It is why BMW are doing so much better then Ford and Toyota for the moment at least…….they are selling the cars to Doctors and high end civil servents who retain some credit capacity……but if the ship of state defaults ?
A BMW 316 ES
35,030 Euros on the road or 38,936 after 37 months……….
In the semi national economy of Ireland in the 80s people would be buying 3 *1 litre petrol cars for the price of a single BMW….
So we get a sort of Albaniaisation of the car fleet where normal people buy a second hand BMW off the local doctor after maybe 5 Years of use….
Interesting dynamics…..BMWs are not too reliable but Mercs keep going and going and going.
Irish Market share (Jan -Sep)
BMW Y2012 : 4.27% Y2007 : 3.88%
Audi Y2012 : 4.67% Y2007 : 2.89% (rich mens toys increase market share)
Ford Y2012 : 10.8% Y2007 : 11.42 %
Toyota Y2012 : 12.54% Y2007 : 15.22 % (everyman cars decrease ? )
Volkswagen Y2012 : 12.66 % (number 1 brand 2012) Y2007 : 11.41%
Witen a few years the Fords of Y2007 will be scrapped….
Ireland will be a island full of Volks.
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