[peripato]

I could easily chart his posts. He posts more than anyone else. I actually have a fulltime job to tend to, unlike him.

This obviously IS your full time job!



It took me about 5 minutes to make this simple graph to prove you are a liar. LOL.

LMAO - totally

SYG, thank you for this...made my day!

[SumYunGai]

I could easily chart his posts. He posts more than anyone else. I actually have a fulltime job to tend to, unlike him.

This obviously IS your full time job!



It took me about 5 minutes to make this simple graph to prove you are a liar. LOL.

LMAO - totally

SYG, thank you for this...made my day!

Thanks, peripato. And your comment just made my day!

I had fun making both of the ennui graphs. It is good to see people getting a kick out of them. If this were a real community and not just an online forum, I would print T-shirts!

[ennui2]

While you're at it, print a T-Shirt that says "I was banned from Peakoil.com and now I'm holier than thou."

[SumYunGai]

While you're at it, print a T-Shirt that says "I was banned from Peakoil.com and now I'm holier than thou."

I don't want to fight with you, ennui. I was just briefly thanking peripato who appreciated the graph I made. You are too sensitive.

I think all of this talk about banning is bad for the forum. It creates an atmosphere of fear. I think we should just discuss our ideas about hydrocarbon depletion and it's impact. All the personal attack stuff gets really tiresome after a while, IMHO.

[ennui2]

PStarr's T-Shirt should be "And I was temporarily banned and now I call everyone trolls."

I think we should just discuss our ideas about hydrocarbon depletion and it's impact.

What depletion? It's still a glut.

[ennui2]

And this is where we circle back and start over yet again.



Anyone want to graph how many times the same arguments have been exchanged?

[Quinny]

Don't know if your name reflects a french connection, but your posts are repetitive and boring as opposed to others who usually have something worth reading.

[Outcast_Searcher]

I believe you are being dismissive, Outcaste? How about that.

I have been making pivot tables, charts, and other exotica in Excel for decades. Thing is I just can not stand most internet-based graphic applications. Too stupid and too slow. But I do like what SumYunGai did to our idiot troll with his idiot charting program. I am fan!

pstarr, it's too bad you have to interpret everything negatively.

I try to help you by answering a question you asked and I didn't see answered, and you accuse me of being dismissive. (I reread my post, and when mentioning how quickly I created a similar chart, I accidentally/stupidly typed "You literally made one" instead of the intended "I literally made one", and missed that in proofreading. If you construed this as an attack from me rather than a typo, I apologize - I wouldn't intentionally do something like that.)

[davep]

There is no exchange, as you are unwilling/unable to debate simple economics.

Dude! You admitted yourself that you weren't interested in economics and the reasoning behind why business cycles happen generally. I guess anyone with a strident view on WHAT IS TO BLAME for 2008 etc without wanting to further their understanding of the underlying economic system and its role in the process is just taking a position based on dogma.

Just my 2c.

[SumYunGai]

There is no exchange, as you are unwilling/unable to debate simple economics.

Dude! You admitted yourself that you weren't interested in economics and the reasoning behind why business cycles happen generally. I guess anyone with a strident view on WHAT IS TO BLAME for 2008 etc without wanting to further their understanding of the underlying economic system and its role in the process is just taking a position based on dogma.

Just my 2c.

So you are saying that pstarr has a strident view based on dogma so his views should be dismissed by everyone? That is pretty close to an ad hominem. Just my 2c.

I could very logically argue that the entire field of economics is itself based on dogma. But Jay Hanson already did that a long time ago. And he did it so well:

http://dieoff.org/page241.htm

Modern economics is nothing more than "Social Darwinism" (the politics -- NOT the science) as first revealed by God to the Dominican Friar St. Thomas Aquinas 750 years ago, and then perfected by the Physiocrats 230 years ago. Unfortunately, God didn't bother to reveal the Laws of Thermodynamics to St. Thomas at the same time as he was doing "free markets". But then it's not too surprising considering the fact that God also neglected to mention that the Earth orbited the Sun.

Any ONE fundamental error in Neoclassical theory should be sufficient reason to reject conclusions based upon that theory. Here are five fundamental errors in the theory:

#1. A fundamentally incorrect "method": the economist uses "correlation" and "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" (after-the-fact) reasoning, rather than the "scientific method" and biological theories of behavior:

Economists enamored of pure markets begin with the theory, and hang models on assumptions that cannot themselves be challenged. The characteristic grammatical usage is an unusual subjunctive -- the verb form 'must be.' For example, if wages for manual workers are declining, it must be that their economic value is declining. If a corporate raider walks away from a deal with half a billion dollars, it must be that he added that much value to the economy. If Japan can produce better autos than Detroit, there must be some inherent locational logic, else the market would not dictate that result. If commercial advertising leads consumers to buy shoddy or harmful products, they must be 'maximizing their utility' -- because we know by assumption that consumers always maximize their utility. How do we know that? Because to do anything else would be irrational. And how do we know that individuals always behave rationally? Because that is the premise from which we begin...

"It was not the methods of science that were appropriated by the early neoclassicals as it was the appearances of science, for the early neoclassicals possessed a singularly inept understanding of the physics they so admired… [ Neoclassical economists attempt ] to reduce all social institutions such as money, property rights, and the market itself to epiphenomena of individual constrained optimization calculation. All these attempts have failed, despite their supposed dependence upon mathematical rigor, because they always inadvertently assume what they aim to deduce… Conservation principles are the key to the understanding of a mathematical formulation of any phenomenon, and it has been there that the neoclassicals have been woefully negligent." [ p. 6, AGAINST MECHANISM: Protecting Economics from Science, by Philip Mirowski; Rowman and Littlefield, 1988; http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ ... rainfood.a ]

#2. A fundamentally inverted world view: the economist sees the environment as a subsystem of the economy, rather than the other way around. In other words, economists are trained to believe that natural resources come from "markets" rather than the "environment". The historical analogy is Johann Kepler and Tycho Brahe watching the dawn together. Kepler sees the sun come into view as the earth turns; Brahe sees the sun begin its daily journey around a static earth.

The corollary is that economists believe that "man-made capital" can substitute for "natural capital". Nobel Laureate Robert Solow:"... the world can, in effect, get along without natural resources ... at some finite cost, production can be freed of dependence on exhaustible resources altogether... [ 1974 lecture to the American Economic Association cited in p. 117, STEADY-STATE ECONOMICS, Herman E. Daly; Island Press, 1991; http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ ... rainfood.a ]

But the First Law of thermodynamics tells us there is no "creation" -- there is no such thing as "man-made capital". Thus, ALL capital is "natural capital", and the economy is 100% dependent on the "environment" for everything.

#3. A fundamentally incorrect view of "money": the economist sees "money" as nothing more than a medium of exchange, rather than as social power -- or "political power":

#4. A fundamentally incorrect view of his raison d'être: the economist sees "Homo economicus" as a "Bayesian utility maximizer", rather than "Homo sapiens" as a "primate":

"Neoclassical economics is based on the premise that models that characterize rational, optimizing behavior also characterize actual human behavior." (R. Thaler, 1987).

"One of the peculiarities of economics is that it still rests on a behavioral assumption -- rational utility maximization -- that has long since been rejected by sociologists and psychologists who specialize in studying human behavior. Rational individual utility (income) maximization was the common assumption of all social science in the nineteenth century, but only economics continues to use it.

#5. A fundamentally incorrect view of economic élan vital: the economist sees economic activity as a function of infinite "money creation", rather than a function of finite "energy stocks" and finite "energy flows":

Economic students are taught that banks "create" money every time they make a loan, and that the economy is powered by money instead of energy. The juxtaposition of these two data (the first is true, the second is false) leads even Nobel Prize-winning economists to conclude they have discovered a perpetual-motion machine:

"Should we be taking steps to limit the use of these most precious stocks of society's capital so that they will still be available for our grandchildren? . Economists ask, Would future generations benefit more from larger stocks of natural capital such as oil, gas, and coal or from more produced capital such as additional scientists, better laboratories, and libraries linked together by information superhighways? ... in the long run, oil and gas are not essential." [ p. 328, ECONOMICS, Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus; McGraw-Hill, 1998; http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ ... rainfood.a ]

No person has had a greater influence on the thinking of experts who have become government regulators of the world's oil and gas industries than economist Morris Adelman: "There are plenty of fossil fuels and no limit to potential electrical capacity. It is all a matter of money." [ p. 483, THE ECONOMICS OF PETROLEUM SUPPLY, by M. A. Adelman; MIT, 1993; http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ ... rainfood.a ]

But of course, economists like Samuelson, Nordhaus, and Adelman are wrong. The First and Second Laws of thermodynamics tells us there is a limit to potential electrical capacity -- it's not all a matter of "money", it's all a matter of "energy".

...

Envision a world utterly destroyed by a lethal education.

[onlooker]

Great reply Sum. Geneticist and climate activist David Suzuki explains how conventional economics a form of brain damage in this clip from the 2011 documentary "Surviving Progress." (available on Netflix). I will post a video summary on the Books forum
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4at5i-oMqE

[davep]

I could very logically argue that the entire field of economics is itself based on dogma.

I agree entirely. Current economic students tend to learn the maths of a certain dominant dogma rather than economics itself. However, that doesn't preclude trying to understand the mechanics of money supply and how it affects business cycles, as it is primordial in understanding the process.

[ROCKMAN]

Or as it could be said: Its not what dogma is in the fight that counts but how much fight is in the dogma. LOL. IOW what matters more then which economic models are correct is which models are used to design decisions and policies. A runt can win a dogfight if it's tenacious enough. Same goes for the truly clueless.

Over 4 decades the Rockman has seen many prospects that looked like crap up front but were still drilled because some geologist just kept pushing the idea. And in many of those cases truly believed they were good investments. But also good to remember that in most of those situations that geologist wasn't risking his money. What we in the oil patch call "having skin in the game". Tends to have a big impact on what probability of success a geologist assigns to a project.

[SumYunGai]

I could very logically argue that the entire field of economics is itself based on dogma.

I agree entirely. Current economic students tend to learn the maths of a certain dominant dogma rather than economics itself. However, that doesn't preclude trying to understand the mechanics of money supply and how it affects business cycles, as it is primordial in understanding the process.

But the highly dogmatic field of economics cannot claim to provide a definitive answer as to the cause or causes of the Great Recession. This is because economics cannot distinguish causes from effects. Economics is a pseudoscience.

Most of the complex economic "analyses" attempted by forum members here begin by describing a lot of detailed interactions that must be caused by this or that. They end with a paragraph admitting that the situation is too complicated to generate any exact answers, and thus these things must be inherently unknowable. That seems highly presumptuous. And very unsatisfying, too. I think there is a better way to understand the world.

Because of it's many fatal flaws, I really have a hard time taking economics very seriously. When it comes to understanding our current energy/economic situation, I think science is the way to go.

[ennui2]

So you are saying that pstarr has a strident view based on dogma so his views should be dismissed by everyone?

The reason you, pstarr, and shortonoil should be dismissed is because you never really address the rebuttals offered by me, Kub, Adam, or others. You brush these rebuttals under the rug and then restate your argument. The argument never incorporates the new data we present to you. Charts are presented that directly contradict PStarr's "demand dearth" narrative. He proceeds to trot out cherry-picked charts of a few Euro-zone contries to pretend that the macro demand picture is going anywhere other than upward. There was also a recent report about the world seeming to permanently go over 400PPM. Well, wouldn't you say that increased CO2 emissions is at least an indirect sign of greater economic activity? Remember how driving in the US actually went DOWN briefly as a direct result of the recession?

These are all flies in the ointment which are casually shrugged off in these threads after which you simply bang out another variant on the same dogmatic, yes, dogmatic, screeds, expecting people to just accept them at face value.

The warning that Hill would start his own blog and would need moderators further backs up the idea that ETP zealots would rather live in an echo-chamber.

If you guys don't want what you say to be dismissed you must demonstrate a willingness to defend your arguments against contradictory data.

The sarcasm/scoffing that PStarr uses when offered this data is not a defense. Trying to popularize terms like "corn liquor" and "eau de bakken". These are attempts to argue through ridicule. They only preach to the converted. So what happens is you have this cultish or tribal closure. Team ETP and team non-ETP and it devolves into nothing but ad hom boulders being hurled back and forth. All along the way are one-sided cries for decorum.

You'll get a debate when you're willing to listen and incorporate data that clashes with your narrative. The more closed-minded you seem, the more annoyed people will become to waste their time offering up valid rebuttals and having them so casually dismissed and shrugged off.