Doly wrote:Name any job/title/position and I can trace it back to energy being the underpinning of it all, that if it were not for energy, that job/title/position could not possibly exists.
Glad to see you are up to the challenge. What is the energy that underpins the job of spin doctor? Because as far as I know, for as long as people have been around, there have been people more than willing to spread whatever lies were useful to the powerful of the time, irrespective of the amount of energy available, and the job usually pays well if it's done effectively.
Spin doc falls under the broader category of useless jobs... Unlike that of "middle man" which at least serves an economic function of arbitrage, many jobs serve no useful purpose, but they exists precisely because the society in which supports or makes possible the existence of said jobs on the whole have an energy surplus.
Right now its estimated only 1% of the US workforce is directly involved in food production/farming/etc. Of course in the historic times and pre-agricultural age, especially during our ancestors hunter and gatherer days, everyone spent most of their time scavenging for food... those that succeeded in finding food survived long enough to pass down their genes, but the not so lucky folks starved to death. In mother nature there is no 'borrowing on credit' or payday loans, if the energy input was less than the energy output, if they weren't able to find enough to eat to cover for their individual calorie expenditures then they starved to death. The energy net, if you will, that these prehistoric cavemen cast was what was within walking distance, and what mother nature grew and made available by the natural rate of berries and fruits and at the rate that sunlight allowed in "real time"...
Once farming and agriculture was invented all of a sudden the systematic planting, growing and harvesting of food allowed for a massive food/energy surplus, whereby many people in that society no longer had to spent time looking for food and could use that surplus energy to do other things, such as researching and inventing tools that made the farming and agricultural process even more efficient and thus increasing the size and scale of that societies "energy net" that it could cast...
But farming and agriculture was still just converting sunlight into energy/food/fuel at a relatively slow rate... it wasn't until hydrocarbons underground were discovered and the steam engine was invented that the likes of coal, oil, and later natural gas that afforded society an exponential increase in the energy outlays... The fossil fuels underground had accumulated over billions of years, capturing the sunlight and compressing it into solid/liquid fuels over the eons... Its fair to say that we have globally consumed roughly half of the avialable net fossil fuels within merely 150 years since the advent of the industrial revolution and yet this was not a 'real time' accumulation (otherwise oil would be growing back as fast as we have been using it) and was the result of billions of years of natural sunlight/photosynthesis accumulation....
With the advent of new hydrocarbon energy sources, we tapped into this billion year energy inheritance in order to vastly increase our civilizations casted energy net, and this energy was available as a work/force/productivity multiplier effect. Where previously before the age of oil and coal, the pyramids and great walls where built by muscle labor from the energy surplus of grains and foods produced in farmland via agriculture, now we could tap into the billion year sunlight accumulation compressed into the form of high EROEI liquid/solid fuels, and coupled with machines that ran on these fuels we instantly increased our civilizations total access, production and consumption of energy by several orders of magnitudes...
As a direct result of this massive energy surplus, not only did the vast majority of society no longer need worry nor concern themselves around finding or making food, in fact it relinquished the need for almost all forms of traditional human labor/muscle input, in that we started building roads, buildings and skyscrapers with power drills, catepillar machines, and transporting materials via train and ship etc... and the underlining infrastructure all required these massive inputs of energy, and it was this extreme work/force/productivity multiplier effect of energy that allowed all of this to happen. To put another way, it was this billion year sunlight energy inheritance compressed into the form of fossil fuels that allowed man to amplify his muscle power and manual human labor, to use this newfound energy to power the machines that did the brunt of the physical work...
Then came the digital/computer revolution... Since most people in society where now freed from having to find food and also freed from having to do manual labor work, this allowed the population to focus instead on math and science, and later on hard physics that brought about transistors and integrated circuits, and other folks to focus on software design, coding, etc and basically the advent of the computer age is what allowed us to leverage the speed of microprocessors coupled with the ingenuity of code/algorithms and later that of AI in the form of deep machine learning and artificial nueral networks in order to leverage the intellectual capabilities of modern computers/automation/AI to serve as an "intellectual multiplier effect" to replace and displace a huge portion of what had traditionally been skilled human labor or that of intellectual jobs etc...
In the 60s a jumbojet required five pilots in the cockpit, but now with the advent of GPS, ILS, and the FMS/FMC/CDU only two pilots are needed for intercontinent long haul flights, getting rid of the navigator, flight engineer, radio operator etc... and soon its possible to get rid of all pilots altogether with the coming era of autonomous transports of all kinds be it self driving cars or air taxis etc etc... You can still buy a flight to the other side of the work for a couple hundred dollars, which is like a weeks of average middle income American salary. Take away the energy surplus and suddenly you will find that it would take you months if not years to naturally cross the oceans on a wind powered sail boat... and the cost would end up being years if not most of the length of your natural lifespan to accumulate that same amount of energy.
With food taken care of, and both human manual labor and most of the intellectual skilled work also automated away soon, there leaves little in the way for most people to do in terms of having to work for survival... we are at a point in which income can become decoupled from actual meaningful work. And had energy not been the limiting factor, we would have surely progressed to a fully automated workforce society that afforded everyone a comfortable UBI/UBS (universal basic income/services) lifestyle where the machines produced all the products and services and we existed to enjoy the surplus productivity/allocations....
This is why most jobs today can afford to be useless jobs like Spin docs and sports stars and NFT daytraders and this that and the other. It is only because of the underlining physical layer that has been propped up by the hydrocarbons underground and powered by the high EROEI billion year compressed sunlight inheritance that the derivative jobs on the upper layers are even possible to exists in the first place!. Take away this energy surplus foundation (high threshold of EROEI) and all the other layers riding on top suddenly collapses like a house of cards domino chain reaction supernova implosion style...
Another example, take the guy making $11 USD flipping burgers at McDonalds... his job wouldn't be possible without oil to power his car so he can get to work on time. But more than just the price of gas, in order to be able to have the job of flipping burgers it requires the existence of everything upstream of him, from the fossil fuel powered infrastructure that grew, harvested and transported the grains, vegetables etc to the machinary needed to process the meats and the fuel needed to power the trucks that transported the food to his local chain etc by the time these ingredients got to his town it already relied heavily on the energy inputs of fossil fuels to make all of it possible in the first place... without which, his job wouldn't exists. So its not just about having energy pocket change to cover the costs of raising gas prices so that he can make it to work in his car, its about EROEI impacted every aspect and every level/layer upstream and downstream of him that makes his position and pay even possible in the first place.... without the high EROEI that made the work/force/productivity multiplier effect of energy possible, then McDonald's wouldn't be able to make the sorts of profits that enable them to be paying this burger flipper $11 USD an hour, a rate which he can use to fetch nearly 3 gallons of gas, which is roughly 6 to 18 weeks of human muscle labor!
Now we have a guy that bought a jpeg image online (literally) for 60 million USD. His 'rationale' for doing this is because he believes one day this single jpeg image (NFT) would be able to fetch 1 billion USD. So I suppose we can all just quick get rich buy, selling, and flipping NFT (blockchain) jpeg images online.... In real life, everything is powered by energy, not money, as Money is just a token/symbol that we use to reductively make sense of the resources and energy flows that enable the economic activities around us. 1 billion dollars can currently buy enough gas to be equal to 12 million man years of human labor manual muscle power.... Instead he believes a jpeg image can be the same.... he thinks there are enough oil undergound to be able to enable him and others like him to set the valuation of absolutely worthless digital virtual images to be the same as the power that built the great pyramids or great wall.... This is the fallacy of our times.
Now that the energy has run out, this mother of all bubbles of all times is collapse inwards on itself domino chain reaction hypernova style... scale invariantly.
