We're Idiots

I mean, how stupid are we, really?



We are sprinting to put in place a network of autonomous, self-feeding, all-seeing drones that are too small and manoeuvrable to avoid, outrun or fight. One of two things will happen : we'll lose control of them (Skynet scenario) or the state will retain control of them (Big Brother scenario). There isn't a third option.

The Oil Shale Bubble

You really should read this. Connects the dots between the financial impropriety and ecologically disastrous energy policies.

Wall Street culture—not to mention the entire suite of economic expectations that guides the behavior of governments, businesses, and most individuals in today’s America—assumes that the close-to-zero return on investment that’s become standard in the last few years is a temporary anomaly, and that a good investment ought to bring in what used to be considered a good annual return: 4%, 6%, 8%, or more. What only a few thinkers on the fringes have grasped is that such returns are only normal in a growing economy, and we no longer have a growing economy.

Sustained economic growth, of the kind that went on from the beginning of the industrial revolution around 1700 to the peak of conventional oil production around 2005, is a rare anomaly in human history. It became a dominant historical force over the last three centuries because cheap abundant energy from fossil fuels could be brought into the economy at an ever-increasing rate, and it stopped because geological limits to fossil fuel extraction put further increases in energy consumption permanently out of reach. Now that fossil fuels are neither cheap nor abundant, and the quest for new energy sources vast and concentrated enough to replace them has repeatedly drawn a blank, we face several centuries of sustained economic contraction—which means that what until recently counted as the groundrules of economics have just been turned on their head.

You will not find many people on Wall Street capable of grasping this. The burden of an outdated but emotionally compelling economic orthodoxy, to say nothing of a corporate and class culture that accords economic growth the sort of unquestioned aura of goodness other cultures assign to their gods, make the end of growth and the coming of permanent economic decline unthinkable to the financial industry, or for that matter to the millions of people in the industrial world who rely on investments to pay their bills. There’s a strong temptation to assume that those 8% per annum returns must still be out there, and when something shows up that appears to embody that hope, plenty of people are willing to rush into it and leave the hard questions for later. Equally, of course, the gap thus opened between expectations and reality quickly becomes a happy hunting ground for scoundrels of every stripe.

Iraq Oil War

Everything you cynical people thought about the Iraq War was ... er ... right

Secret memos expose link between oil firms and invasion of Iraq

You know, I was actually wrong on this. I thought that the UK government wasn't so influenced by the immediate oil angle as it was by a more general global realpolitick. Guess I was naive.

Tory Polluters Win Energy Bill

BBC News - Government delays setting carbon target until after election

How does one read this?

Tories

a) refuse to commit to CO2 reduction
b) as a "compromise" continue to commit to funding of alt.energy
c) I bet that that alt.energy includes nuclear, hence the Tories plan to funnel money to their friends in nuclear industry

Crap.

The Logic Of The Future

John Robb :


One way to accomplish [trading energy for computation] quickly (before the old system completely fails) is to decentralize production with networked resilient communities.  At that point, the global economy would be 98% information and all basic needs would be provided for locally.  Information only economies built on a base of self-sufficiency can be as different from capitalism as capitalism is from feudalism.

The Wrong Kind of Magic

The Arch-Druid on the Wrong Kind of Magic

Email today from my electricity supplier :

Dear Mr P Jones

You may have heard that we're changing our prices. With reduced quantities of North Sea gas we now buy more energy on the global wholesale market. World events are pushing up these prices and distribution and network charges are also increasing. This is affecting all energy suppliers in the UK. Unfortunately, as a result, we have to increase our prices.

We're sorry to say this increase will affect you and your new prices will come into effect on 1st October 2011. You'll shortly receive a letter with details about the changes to your tariff so you don't need to contact us...

Meanwhile Vinay calls the collapse as "soon".

Here's a thought, vibing off that previous idea of combining processing and heat generation, I'm answering a Quora question on BitCoin.

Why not a special heater who's heating element is a custom processor designed for bitmining? You create bitcoins as a side effect of heating your room, or boiling your kettle :-)

Update : It's happening.

I've wondered about this for a while :

in the United States heating uses even more energy (6 percent of the national total, according to the Department of Energy) than servers do (3 percent). If servers doubled as heaters, we’d be getting the same services for half the energy cost.

Kunstler :

For those of you interested in the reality side of things, here's the scoop: The price of oil is going to go way up, and way down, and way up again, and way down again until everyone is too broke to ask for any, and companies are too ruined to go get it for them, and governments are too broken to interfere in the process.

Nice example of a house which generates energy.

Brilliant bit of alt.energy research. Cracking water directly into hydrogen and oxygen in a fuel cell.

Sounds very promising.

Sweet :

Residents have overwhelmingly said ‘yes’ to the idea of having a wind turbine on Hackney Marshes to generate green energy.

In response to Hackney Council’s recent public consultation, 87 per cent said they were in favour of the proposal.

It's amazing that over 10 years after Michael H. Goldhaber wrote "The Attention Economy", Eric Raymond wrote "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and at least 8 years after Clay Shirky wrote "Help! The Price of Information has Fallen ..." that famous, public alleged "thinkers" are arguing about this at such a naive level.

Anderson is right that Free will dominate the production of *non-scarce* information products. (The only paid information products will be commissioned ie. the author will be paid for attention.) But he's lying through his teeth about there being opportunities to build business models around this.

Rubbish! It's just going to get amateurized. And there won't be much of a money-business at all around the provision of content or culture. Or its "community management".

It's not going to happen with non-scarce resources, which is why there *will* be a "Hosting" business. And a business supplying computers or handsets to access the free information. But these will be far smaller than the currently existing computer and phone businesses. (Think Open Source circuit-board design meets printable electronics.)

It's true that Anderson doesn't answer Gladwell's "cost of the distribution infrastructure" point. I'd say that the best answer to that is likely to be that we're going to break up those big infrastructures and replace them with smaller, cheaper, more decentralized production. So we won't need the grid because we'll be catching our own sun and wind energy (free) with locally made equipment (very cheap) and local distribution nets (cheaper). Similar for food, furniture, homes etc. Production that relies on huge economies of scale, mass-production, mass-marketing, long-distance transport etc. is likely to go bust anyway due to energy crunch on one side, and smarter, better informed tools which can pull manufacturing closer to the end-consumer, on the other.

I'm getting interested in Solar Cooking.

Apparently there was a project in Brasilia last year. (pdf)

Solar balloons looking good.

Gravity Planes

Cringely is a genius ... too bad no-one takes this kind of brilliance seriously. :-(

I wonder if Ekranoplans have a future in more energy-efficient fast transatlantic travel.

Interesting biofuels research project.

Update : It's worth highlighting this :

Q. What is your assessment of the current national conversation on biofuels? Is public understanding of the topic more nuanced than, say, a few years ago?

A. Unfortunately the press is not very good at distinguishing between the many different kinds of biofuels. Currently "biofuels," in public discourse, means corn ethanol, sugar-cane ethanol, and rape seed or soybean diesel. We're not actually in favor of three of those four. We think that sugar-cane ethanol is environmentally positive; we don't think the other three are.

It would be real useful to make a change in the lingo. We'd like to find a way to distinguish what we're doing from what's currently considered "biofuels" — because we're actually not in favor of some of those things. We're specifically not in favor of biodiesel, or much of it. If you have some used cooking oil or tallow kicking around, putting it into biodiesel is environmentally attractive. But manufacturing if from rape seed or soybean — that's actually a bad use of land.

For a hectare (2.47 acres) of soybeans, for example, you can get, maximum, about 200 gallons of biodiesel. From a hectare of miscanthus you can get 2,000 gallons of ethanol. And that hectare of soybeans also requires a lot of inputs, and has erosion and runoff. With a hectare of miscanthus, on the other hand, there's no runoffs that we're aware of, no emissions. I think it's irresponsible to use soybean acres to produce tiny amounts of fuel, diverting land away from food production. For the energy crops that we're interested in, we envision they'll be growing on land that doesn't compete with food production.