Peak Oil News and Message Boards

Money is just a tool. Concentrated surplus can do positive things in the hands of those who want to do positive things, or vice-versa. The Gates Foundation is busy trying to cure malaria and whatever else. Elon Musk has done more to get EVs going (despite being unable to build cars with decent panel alignment and paint jobs) than any government initiatives ever did. And so on. It's been many decades since the government has been able to do anything significant at a macro level (cold war tech developments being the golden age).

Kickstarter aside, diffuse money at the grass-roots scale doesn't yield big projects like that.

If they have, they haven’t spent it.

If you bought Apple at $10/ share, but now it’s trading for $200/share you have greatly increased your prospective wealth. But all you invested was $10. The other $190 is just sitting there. And if Apple shares drop, that prospective wealth vanishes. But it’s not like you invested $200 and it’s doing something.

Newfie wrote:If they have, they haven’t spent it.

If you bought Apple at $10/ share, but now it’s trading for $200/share you have greatly increased your prospective wealth. But all you invested was $10. The other $190 is just sitting there. And if Apple shares drop, that prospective wealth vanishes. But it’s not like you invested $200 and it’s doing something.

Meanwhile, millions of others have jumped into Apple shares, either as individuals or via various funds, as millions have purchased Apple products that become 'obsolete' in a couple of years so folks go out and buy more Apple products,,, all of this, in the real world, underwritten by mass consumption of resources and energy along with massive waste streams. Therein lies the looming true price discovery, regardless of what one share's price has magically risen to. There's a planet-depleting disconnect required for this to occur.

Methinks that Average Joe, on some underlying level, knows this cannot continue. The symptoms of this yet-to-be-realized future are trends like growing populism worldwide, and the bizarre people who have come to power as cracks appear in the overall normalcy biases that allow Average Joe to plod along day to day. Other, more informed, players retreat into compartmentalized-cum-specialized endeavors,, avoiding big-picture-related cognitive dissonance. Some may call this 'maintaining one's sanity', but in reality it's the exact opposite.

Those are some good observations.

GHung wrote: Other, more informed, players retreat into compartmentalized-cum-specialized endeavors,, avoiding big-picture-related cognitive dissonance. Some may call this 'maintaining one's sanity', but in reality it's the exact opposite.

I recognize big picture related cognitive dissonance but yet I must confess that I also avoid too much thought about it. This is mental sanity actually because part of the macro problems that cause this cognitive dissonance don't really have a solution. So ask yourself what you gain by recognizing and staying focused on the big picture.

I much prefer living day by day, in the moment, celebrating the nature around me and sharing time in the wilderness with guests. Frankly, the consequences that are looming daily closer and closer to real time events don't occupy much of my time except for when I come on this site or when I have a guest who is suffering from angst over the state of the world.

The unsolvable aspects of human overshoot are in fact better ignored. I think this is sanity. I also think it is insane to over focus on it. It fucks you up.

On that note I totally agree with you, Ibon. Acceptance is the way to go. That's why the discussion here is so bifurcated. The loudest voices are those who have the strongest emotional attachment to doom for one reason or another. The anger stage of grief. They just don't realize how much of a waste of energy it is. It's not activism. It's not moving anybody to change. It's just, well, empty ranting and venting.





It's the keyboard-warrior equivalent of yelling into a pillow or punching their hand through a wall in frustration. Well, after you've done that, THEN what? It gets kind of old and repetitive after a while.

Acknowledgement and acceptance aren't mutually exclusive. One can go with the flow without being in denial of things as they are and how they will likely turn out. It says a lot that some here just want others to STFU about it; call them "doomers". Trying to keep the monsters under the bed?

Trying to keep the monsters under the bed?

trying to.keep them out of your head is more like it.

Obviously each of has some adaptive technique that may or may not resonate with others. The trick is to be able to tolerate the various techniques without devolving into personal attacks. (Keep repeating to self until I learn this.)

Jesus reportedly said: "The poor will always be with you" (Mark 14:7)

But it may be more accurate to say that certain rich families have been with us for a long, long time!


Rich forever: rich families stay rich for centuries

"the richest families in Florence 600 years ago remain the same now."

" a family’s status in England can persist for more than eight centuries"

https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-famil ... -florence/

dohboi, I simply do not understand WHY you care that someone may have more, or less, than yourself. After all, Nature is not fair, and it is entirely natural for one animal to have more of anything than another has in virtually every case.

As we have mentioned before, there is a great deal of merit in the unequal distribution of almost everything, and the constraints this imposes on virtually everything that humans do. Whatever Jesus, Ghandhi, or Marx has to say about such a situation means even less.

Yes, I imagine that in a perfect world, sharing everything and consuming a bare minimum of calories, we could grow the human population to 10, 20, 30 Billion or more. When we reach the limits of everything more or less simultaneously, only the grimmest choices willl remain, and the human cannibals alone will survive the collapse.

I just can't figure out WHY you would want such a world to come about. It seems the cruelest of all possible worlds.

Humans are top level predators.

Among humans there are also top level predators.

We call them billionaires.

They call us lunch.

I'm not sure how it would improve matters for the rest of us, if every billionaire disappeared tomorrow.

Newfie wrote:Humans are top level predators.

Among humans there are also top level predators.

We call them billionaires.

They call us lunch.

Some are predators, some are parasites
Take away their monies and they are as frightened as bunnies.....

Cog wrote:I'm not sure how it would improve matters for the rest of us, if every billionaire disappeared tomorrow.

Maybe the star chamber manipulation of the markets and government policy would go away. The oil industry billionaires have been busy destroying electrical transport infrastructure (which includes nuclear power) and spreading lies about climate science for decades. They see nuclear power, electrified transport and action on climate change as an existential threat to their cash flow. Given their vast pool of money, they corrupt the system from judges to politicians to preserve their dinosaur business model.

All the defense of the poor, innocent billionaires in the posts above is simply childish. These people don't just have money, they wield it as power. And most of all they hate technological advancement and competition that does not help to fatten their wallets. And no, the super rich do not create the economy. The low paid masses do since they drive almost all of the product demand.

The Third World is filled with low paid masses yet very low on billionaires. It is the First World with the huge Middle Class that includes YOU that the billionaires created.

Evidently the masses in the third world don't think it's such a great deal to live in the third world since we have to build a wall to keep them out.

If you took away billionaires that would create a social vacume and that vacuume would be shortly filled by a new set of billionaires. Think of it from a evolutionary point of view. Does it exist? Why, what purpose did it serve? Is it an anacronisim, like an apendix we can cut out? Or does it have some function we don’t understand?

I’m going with it has some social function because we see to loge celebrities. We, the herd, seem to need those at the top for some reason. Movie stars, media of all kind stars, sports stars, financial stars. Most likely they have some social niche they are fulfilling. It maybe that of a lion, or that of bacteria in your gut, both necessary.

Cog wrote:Evidently the masses in the third world don't think it's such a great deal to live in the third world since we have to build a wall to keep them out.

98% of residents in Central and South America have zero and I mean zero desire to go the US.

Where are you getting your information?

I think you need to take that trip to Guatemala.

Ibon wrote:

Cog wrote:Evidently the masses in the third world don't think it's such a great deal to live in the third world since we have to build a wall to keep them out.

98% of residents in Central and South America have zero and I mean zero desire to go the US.

Where are you getting your information?

I think you need to take that trip to Guatemala.

Ibon, the USA has an estimated 12-14 million illegal Hispanic immigrants today, meaning that we already have 2% of the South and Central American population living here. Admittedly, the number has been declining recently, but the border crossings in both directions remain a high number. I see the wall as a means of reducing crime (human trafficing) and illegal drugs, primarily opioids.