[AdamB]

And what if we are nearing peak oil for real this time? Then it would explain a lot the behavior of China, Russia and Iran. What if we are seeing the final grab for power over the last remaining energy resources?

RU energy ministry said as much last year, they peaked in 2019. They would recover from the covid slump but never get back to 2019. Take it with a grain of salt but realize the notion is in the air. EIA has called peak a couple of times.

I am not familiar with EIA calling peak multiple times, unless you are referring to modeled results coming from a product like the IEO, as opposed to a direct study of the topic? Do you have a reference? Their direct study on the topic some 18 years ago was the 2037 number.

[evilgenius]

And what if we are nearing peak oil for real this time? Then it would explain a lot the behavior of China, Russia and Iran. What if we are seeing the final grab for power over the last remaining energy resources?

RU energy ministry said as much last year, they peaked in 2019. They would recover from the covid slump but never get back to 2019. Take it with a grain of salt but realize the notion is in the air. EIA has called peak a couple of times.

The nations mentioned RU, NK, Iran, and recently and perhaps again the US, are run by narcissists interested primarily in themselves, their power, perhaps the inscription below their triumphal monuments. Not sure why their cultists indulge them but they do.

I expect more like the above. Diminishing returns to complexity and trickling up of profit require a scapegoat, any will do really. Maybe that is what putins "Ukrainian Nazis" are meant to be. Give the hoards an enemy, any enemy, on which to focus their rage and frustration.

I have a conspiracy theorist friend. He told me about the Nazi problem a long time ago. He thinks the Maidan revolution was orchestrated by Nazis. He thinks Ukraine is full of Nazis. He thinks that the US is infected with Nazis, and they wrought the revolution, to the detriment of Russia. It's Russian propaganda that comes out of a real world situation. There are Nazis, but not nearly as many as my friend tries to imply there are. Most of those who they are calling Nazis are just people who are so conservative that they severely limit what others can do, in terms of liberalization. But that also describes how Putin has aligned himself with the Eastern Orthodox Church. Putin is also very conservative. He also hates homosexuals and is against women's rights, just like any Nazi. It's a mistake to try and work a playing card between the two. The correct answer, in terms of liberalization, is some third thing that never comes up in these discussions because most people are really working one side of the narrow argument or the other, trying to put a card between the two. They are just taking arbitrary sides, really, and ignoring the vast sea of people who are not represented in the argument by anybody. To represent those people, you need to liberalize.

[theluckycountry]

It's interesting going back over some of the predictions in this thread, many, like the thread starter by pops was half accurate but the NEW WAR in the Ukraine threw it off balance, as the price of oil rose above the $100 mark. I couldn't have predicted to war, no one could have, but I could have predicted the rise in oil price. The pandemic response and the war response have a single common thread as I see it, to reduce the consumption of oil globally.

Why people believe these responses are what the media portrays them as is strange to me. We all know oil is the key to our civilization, and that's it will will gone for all practical purposes in a few decades, for us little people that is to say. Why it is such a stretch to believe that global governments would have enacted a drastic plan to reduce it's consumption? I'm certainly not suggesting that the virus or the war were engineered for this purpose but I am suggesting that they are being used for it.

Germany is doing fine today, it's right there by the war zone but they are not in blackout and their service stations are not empty. Up here in Australia we are suffering the same price hikes for our energy as they are yet none of our imports come from anywhere near the warzone. In one sense it should not be effecting us but we are being dragged into it with higher petrol prices (because of evil putin) I don't by it at all, it's a racket and the end result is lower oil consumption again.

I'll make a prediction for the future, whenever this war resolves, or scales back into obscurity, it will be followed by Another crises, and then another crises, and each time fuel consumption will be targeted, each time the peoples of the Western World will see their standard of living decline, whether that is in shortages of stuff, or simply their inability to afford what they used to.

[JuanP]

I also think the Supreme Court will overturn Row vs. Wade. But I think that will become a major catalyst for change.

You nailed that one, EG!

[JuanP]

Mon 20 Dec 2021
I expect the Republicans to win majorities in Congress in the 2022 elections.

I expect a total of around 1 million Americans to have died of COVID-19 by the end of 2022. I would really welcome being wrong on this guess.

I was correct about US COVID-19 deaths, which gives me no pleasure or satisfaction at all. We'll have to wait until November to see how good or bad my other prediction was, but I still stand by it.

[Newfie]

About predictions.

Danny Kahanaman (sp?), the psychologist awarded the Nobel in Economics for proving its all done in a big US assumption, has research that says, in general pundits or experts are a little worse at predictions than the average person.

The WEF, the Davis crowd, has prepared an annual World Risk Assessment for the past 17 years. this is the collective work of over a thousand of the best and brightest feo around the world. Wgike I am n jt a big fan of the WEF I believe this report is an honest effort to gage risk.

They completely missed the biological threat from Covid in the 2020 report and the European land war in the 2022 report.

[vtsnowedin]

About predictions., has research that says, in general pundits or experts are a little worse at predictions than the average person.

.

It has also been shown that "professional" wall street advisors and fund managers are no better then average, in fact worse in most cases as they churn accounts unnecessarily incurring trading and tax costs for the clients.

[Outcast_Searcher]

They completely missed the biological threat from Covid in the 2020 report and the European land war in the 2022 report.

Expecting experts to get lots of specific low probability events right, down to the year they happen, in general forecasts, is unrealistic enough as to be downright silly. (How smart would experts look predicting or even talking about a global pandemic every year between, say 1920 and 2018? Or a major Russian land war every year from 1946 to 1920? (And yes, the Russians do periodically show aggression by attacking someone. So does the US).

For example: economists have trouble predicting economic activity a year ahead with any meaningful degree of accuracy, and they're truly experts on a fairly narrow subject compared to anything from war to disease and everything in between.

Or look how random the efforts on this site were, re trying to predict crude oil prices for the year ahead -- year after year, despite all the interest in that subject here.

It's not an accident that it is VERY VERY hard to actually outperform the financial markets over time with short term trading. That pesky thing called "the future" and the unpredictability inherent in that keeps getting in the way of short term thinking / trades.

[vtsnowedin]

Actually the death of some six million in a world population of seven billion amounted to no more then a major out break of toe nail fungus.
What really cost us a lot was the collective world governments panicked response to it which has shut down economies and impoverished millions.
You have three or four old people dead a couple of years early versus two dozen out of work and their lives destroyed because "their business" was not deemed essential while the big box corporations lost not a day of business.
You want a bold prediction?
This debacle will haunt those that were in charge for decades.

[JuanP]

Actually the death of some six million in a world population of seven billion amounted to no more then a major out break of toe nail fungus.
What really cost us a lot was the collective world governments panicked response to it which has shut down economies and impoverished millions.
You have three or four old people dead a couple of years early versus two dozen out of work and their lives destroyed because "their business" was not deemed essential while the big box corporations lost not a day of business.
You want a bold prediction?
This debacle will haunt those that were in charge for decades.

You are living in the past!

The global population is more than 7,950,000,000. Rounding down that number to 7 billion is a mathematical error!

https://www.worldometers.info/

[Newfie]

They completely missed the biological threat from Covid in the 2020 report and the European land war in the 2022 report.

Expecting experts to get lots of specific low probability events right, down to the year they happen, in general forecasts, is unrealistic enough as to be downright silly. (How smart would experts look predicting or even talking about a global pandemic every year between, say 1920 and 2018? Or a major Russian land war every year from 1946 to 1920? (And yes, the Russians do periodically show aggression by attacking someone. So does the US).

For example: economists have trouble predicting economic activity a year ahead with any meaningful degree of accuracy, and they're truly experts on a fairly narrow subject compared to anything from war to disease and everything in between.

Or look how random the efforts on this site were, re trying to predict crude oil prices for the year ahead -- year after year, despite all the interest in that subject here.

It's not an accident that it is VERY VERY hard to actually outperform the financial markets over time with short term trading. That pesky thing called "the future" and the unpredictability inherent in that keeps getting in the way of short term thinking / trades.

It is not that they did not predict COVID, they completely ignored the possibility of ANY biological risk. Huma ity and our feed stock make up a maority of biomass. This is a u ique event in Earth's history. Clearly such a concentration of organisation of order around any one organism e poses it to natural attack. Humanity represents a huge food source to the natural world. To ignore this simple principle is an astounding blind spot.

In the course of human history there have been few periods without war. Riffing off E. O. Wilson's analysis human social units tend to compete the same way individuals do in most other species. For example male lions fight male lions for a pride but adjacent ant colonies fight one another for territory. Humans do both, fight individually but also collectively. But also Europe has had a long stretch of relative peace, odds are that will not continue, that our inate nature will express itself.

I agree that the specifics are very difficult to predict. But to ignore the fundamental forces is a big mistake. I may have overshot by saying EUROPEAN war, but simply expand that to "armed conflict between major powers" and my point still stands.

[vtsnowedin]

Actually the death of some six million in a world population of seven billion amounted to no more then a major out break of toe nail fungus.
What really cost us a lot was the collective world governments panicked response to it which has shut down economies and impoverished millions.
You have three or four old people dead a couple of years early versus two dozen out of work and their lives destroyed because "their business" was not deemed essential while the big box corporations lost not a day of business.
You want a bold prediction?
This debacle will haunt those that were in charge for decades.

You are living in the past!

The global population is more than 7,950,000,000. Rounding down that number to 7 billion is a mathematical error!

https://www.worldometers.info/

I was not going for precision as one million out of either seven billion or seven point nine billion makes the same point of it being insignificant.
I have lived a lot in the past, as in my lifetime the worlds population has climbed from 2.8 billion to the present 7.9 billion. It is like counting buffalo as they stampede by you.

[C8]

Actually the death of some six million in a world population of seven billion amounted to no more then a major out break of toe nail fungus.
What really cost us a lot was the collective world governments panicked response to it which has shut down economies and impoverished millions.
You have three or four old people dead a couple of years early versus two dozen out of work and their lives destroyed because "their business" was not deemed essential while the big box corporations lost not a day of business.
You want a bold prediction?
This debacle will haunt those that were in charge for decades.

People sometimes post reasoned thought out plans for mass energy transition, decarbonization, smart cities, etc. These often come with tons of details, charts, graphs- its really quite impressive.

But then I think of the Covid panic and how irrational governments and citizens acted, how it was quickly turned to political purposes- and I realize that societies are not measured and scientific but wild and vicious, and that all those detailed energy plans based on "rational man" are really just fantasies which will never come true.

I now read them as if they were religious text or religious fables describing an imaginary world that will never exists. "Rational man" is as much a myth as Zeus- its what secularists comfort themselves with and deceive themselves with. The greatest energy plans in the world are all based on mythology.

Education has no effect at all on human nature- none at all. In fact, less educated societies handled the Covid problem better and panicked less. Education is religious indoctrination into the cult of "rational man". The school and university are the new churches. Its all make believe.

[AdamB]

Education has no effect at all on human nature- none at all. In fact, less educated societies handled the Covid problem better and panicked less. Education is religious indoctrination into the cult of "rational man". The school and university are the new churches. Its all make believe.

A pretty severe conclusion. Do you have some empirical or factual information or analysis that led you to this conclusion? Or is it a working hypothesis, or something more of a feeling, and speculative in nature? While I agree that education isn't all it is cracked up to be, education and learning and science have led us to be more than hunter gatherers, and I would bet that most modern folk would prefer their more modern lifestyle than the one that involves eating squirrel and ants while hoping that you don't get caught by something higher up the food chain. We haven't always been the apex land predator.

[Tanada]

Education has no effect at all on human nature- none at all. In fact, less educated societies handled the Covid problem better and panicked less. Education is religious indoctrination into the cult of "rational man". The school and university are the new churches. Its all make believe.

A pretty severe conclusion. Do you have some empirical or factual information or analysis that led you to this conclusion? Or is it a working hypothesis, or something more of a feeling, and speculative in nature? While I agree that education isn't all it is cracked up to be, education and learning and science have led us to be more than hunter gatherers, and I would bet that most modern folk would prefer their more modern lifestyle than the one that involves eating squirrel and ants while hoping that you don't get caught by something higher up the food chain. We haven't always been the apex land predator.

Personally I blame it on lack of proper education. Those "low education societies" that did well were the ones where people had real world experience to determine how much of a threat Covid was to them and their society at large compared to other threats like hostile governments in their local area or outbreaks of measles that routinely kill many more people than COVID. People in the "educated" west have been thoroughly insulated from many of the harsh realities that are present in other places and have forgotten how deadly childhood diseases were in the period up until around 1970 when routine childhood immunizations finally suppressed those diseases out of the current cultural awareness.

In 1950 odds were extremely high in Anytown, USA that you personally knew people or had yourself experienced Polio, Mumps, Measles, Rubella, Scarlett Fever, Smallpox or a long list of other often fatal diseases. To people who had seen friends, neighbors or relatives die in the 10%+ rate from these diseases the threat of Covid with its less than 3% death rate seems a pretty minor concern. The same is true of something like Radiation sickness. If you survived Smallpox growing up your fear level of something that would give you flu like symptoms for a couple weeks but probably not kill you was pretty tolerant. Today when you are even somewhat protected from routine influenza that typically has a less than 1% fatality rate hearing that an accident in Fukushima might increase your chance of getting cancer from 30% during your lifetime to 30.1% sounds pretty scary. Heck we now routinely immunize children for Chickenpox which has something like a 0.1% fatality rate!

In this environment any new threat no matter how minor grows to epic proportions in the imagination of the person hearing about it without a rational frame of reference. Joe6P hears that Covid kills 3% of those who catch it and doesn't absorb the fact that almost all of those fatalities are in person 75+ years of age and they start seeing the threat in every handshake or other social interaction. They demand Uncle Sam do something NOW to protect them with no clear understanding of what the threat actually is and no understanding of their real world risk factor. Meanwhile they routinely drive to work which has a substantial risk every time they leave their home without a second thought because that threat is something they have experience with and they intuitively understand how weak the threat actually is. Meanwhile in Africa and South America where daily life has much larger threats the panic was far less or even entirely absent.

Sweden did not lock down though many did voluntarily self isolate. Net result the Swedish economic state was far less impacted and their death rate was completely average compared to the rest of Europe and North America.

[C8]

Education has no effect at all on human nature- none at all. In fact, less educated societies handled the Covid problem better and panicked less. Education is religious indoctrination into the cult of "rational man". The school and university are the new churches. Its all make believe.

A pretty severe conclusion. Do you have some empirical or factual information or analysis that led you to this conclusion? Or is it a working hypothesis, or something more of a feeling, and speculative in nature? While I agree that education isn't all it is cracked up to be, education and learning and science have led us to be more than hunter gatherers, and I would bet that most modern folk would prefer their more modern lifestyle than the one that involves eating squirrel and ants while hoping that you don't get caught by something higher up the food chain. We haven't always been the apex land predator.

First off- what Tanada said makes part of my argument.

Secondly, a highly educated society produces a population that comes to expect answers from small group of experts. This stifles the ability of people to think for themselves or to conduct their own research. People discount the real world in favor of what they see on the media.

I had a group of students last year an after they returned to school from lockdowns, I asked them what the death rate was for Covid. Students gave me all kinds of answers, but the average range was somewhere between 30 to 60%. I then asked the students if they thought that 30 to 60% of the people in our neighborhood were gone. When they considered it, most of them realized that they were way off. One student actually thought that the death rate was 100% (the whole class laughed!). When i told them that the actual death rate was less than 1/2 of 1% in one year they were astounded.

Education produces societies were people discount what they actually see in the real world versus what they hear on the news because they are taught that the news and experts reported on the news are the sources of all information in society. Highly educated people lose their own ability to think independently. I don't think this is the intention of education but I think this is the outcome and I think it is an outcome that must happen all the time in educated societies. Simply sitting in a school and accepting knowledge from an expert conditions people to see the world whatever way experts tell them to see it- even if you teach people to think for themselves they don't b/c of conditioning.

I don't think there is any way around this.

[AdamB]

Secondly, a highly educated society produces a population that comes to expect answers from small group of experts. This stifles the ability of people to think for themselves or to conduct their own research. People discount the real world in favor of what they see on the media.

Do you have a reference to someone who has tried to argue this statement, or is something you've just decided is a truism? The highly educated society leads to answers from small groups of experts?

And people are rarely capable of conducting their own research. Confirmation bias is generally the most likely outcome.

I had a group of students last year an after they returned to school from lockdowns, I asked them what the death rate was for Covid. Students gave me all kinds of answers, but the average range was somewhere between 30 to 60%. I then asked the students if they thought that 30 to 60% of the people in our neighborhood were gone. When they considered it, most of them realized that they were way off. One student actually thought that the death rate was 100% (the whole class laughed!). When i told them that the actual death rate was less than 1/2 of 1% in one year they were astounded.

Sounds like when peak oilers were busy assembling rapture scenarios and I told them they were full of crap. That was after having "researched" the topic.

Education produces societies were people discount what they actually see in the real world versus what they hear on the news because they are taught that the news and experts reported on the news are the sources of all information in society. Highly educated people lose their own ability to think independently.

Presuming they had it in the first place. There are different types of learning and thinking, sometimes one type of thinking ability just doesn't fit with the problem being addressed.

I don't think this is the intention of education but I think this is the outcome and I think it is an outcome that must happen all the time in educated societies. Simply sitting in a school and accepting knowledge from an expert conditions people to see the world whatever way experts tell them to see it- even if you teach people to think for themselves they don't b/c of conditioning.

I don't think there is any way around this.

Sure there is. More education, but perhaps not of the kind or within the system you are thinking.

Teaching objectivity is quite difficult, sometimes impossible, and a prerequisite of "educating" on most topics, including doing honest research. I do agree that some of the conditions you describe are hardly condusive to folks thinking for themselves, let alone making them capable of "research".

[C8]

Secondly, a highly educated society produces a population that comes to expect answers from small group of experts. This stifles the ability of people to think for themselves or to conduct their own research. People discount the real world in favor of what they see on the media.

Do you have a reference to someone who has tried to argue this statement, or is something you've just decided is a truism? The highly educated society leads to answers from small groups of experts?

And people are rarely capable of conducting their own research. Confirmation bias is generally the most likely outcome.

I had a group of students last year an after they returned to school from lockdowns, I asked them what the death rate was for Covid. Students gave me all kinds of answers, but the average range was somewhere between 30 to 60%. I then asked the students if they thought that 30 to 60% of the people in our neighborhood were gone. When they considered it, most of them realized that they were way off. One student actually thought that the death rate was 100% (the whole class laughed!). When i told them that the actual death rate was less than 1/2 of 1% in one year they were astounded.

Sounds like when peak oilers were busy assembling rapture scenarios and I told them they were full of crap. That was after having "researched" the topic.

Education produces societies were people discount what they actually see in the real world versus what they hear on the news because they are taught that the news and experts reported on the news are the sources of all information in society. Highly educated people lose their own ability to think independently.

Presuming they had it in the first place. There are different types of learning and thinking, sometimes one type of thinking ability just doesn't fit with the problem being addressed.

I don't think this is the intention of education but I think this is the outcome and I think it is an outcome that must happen all the time in educated societies. Simply sitting in a school and accepting knowledge from an expert conditions people to see the world whatever way experts tell them to see it- even if you teach people to think for themselves they don't b/c of conditioning.

I don't think there is any way around this.

Sure there is. More education, but perhaps not of the kind or within the system you are thinking.

Teaching objectivity is quite difficult, sometimes impossible, and a prerequisite of "educating" on most topics, including doing honest research. I do agree that some of the conditions you describe are hardly condusive to folks thinking for themselves, let alone making them capable of "research".

Looks like you got all the answers Adam. Too bad you can't explain why a highly educated group of societies produced such an uneducated response to Covid.

[Newfie]

Education has no effect at all on human nature- none at all. In fact, less educated societies handled the Covid problem better and panicked less. Education is religious indoctrination into the cult of "rational man". The school and university are the new churches. Its all make believe.

A pretty severe conclusion. Do you have some empirical or factual information or analysis that led you to this conclusion? Or is it a working hypothesis, or something more of a feeling, and speculative in nature? While I agree that education isn't all it is cracked up to be, education and learning and science have led us to be more than hunter gatherers, and I would bet that most modern folk would prefer their more modern lifestyle than the one that involves eating squirrel and ants while hoping that you don't get caught by something higher up the food chain. We haven't always been the apex land predator.

I already provided that in my reference above.
Try reading

"Thinking Fast and Slow".

The author received a Nobel prize in Economics for proving that thr traditional market model, that humans make rational decisions based on their own best interest, is flawed.

The recommended book brings that research to the average reader and describes how we make decisions. It is an annoying book to read because he builds his case very methodically, study by study.

A more light heated and accessible read that approaches re subject from a different perspective is "Mother Nature is Trying to Kill You." This gentleman wi introduce you to the concept that we are merely "meat robots" driven by genetic programming we got from bacteria.

Now if you want to go further and into the biochemistry try reading Sopolski, any of him. He will cave your head in bludgeoning it with scientific proof.

And if you care to take a different tack try reading Gibbon "Rise and Decline of the Roman Empire" to get a sense of how stagnet human intellectual progress has been over the last 2,000 years.

If you care to read it is accessible.

[AdamB]

Teaching objectivity is quite difficult, sometimes impossible, and a prerequisite of "educating" on most topics, including doing honest research. I do agree that some of the conditions you describe are hardly condusive to folks thinking for themselves, let alone making them capable of "research".

Looks like you got all the answers Adam. Too bad you can't explain why a highly educated group of societies produced such an uneducated response to Covid.

Oh please. Answers to everything is exactly who I am not. I'm more of a Socrates type guy.



As far as educated societies, since when do humans do collective intelligience, rather then just being a bunch of scared mortals seeking guidance from voices from heaven and solace in tales of a fantasyland after their demise? All these educated societies you speak of consist of those scared people, educated or otherwise. And in their collective wisdom there has never been a requirement they do educated, or uneducated responses to anything. Cross your fingers and flip a coin is about as good as it gets.