Peak Oil News and Message Boards

For exemple the newly invented magic plug... infinite power at your disposal anywhere: link

That had me in stitches.

I'd assume that is not being aired on TV?

put one on your electric car, recharge it as you go.

You need a whole branch of technology just to battle the problems that technology creates.

Heineken wrote:You need a whole branch of technology just to battle the problems that technology creates.

Technology is just a tool, so saying it's good or bad kinda misses the point. Unless of course the point is fear mongering/anthropomorphizing, then it's right on.

My statement wasn't fear-mongering. It was just a statement of fact.

Ever hear the phrase "unanticipated consequences"?

My thesis is that most technological achievements create at least as many problems as they solve. So many examples come to mind.

At best, all you end up doing is pushing the problem around, not solving it.

neocone wrote:For example the newly invented magic plug.

Funny as heck! Thanks!

Heineken wrote:My statement wasn't fear-mongering. It was just a statement of fact.

Ever hear the phrase "unanticipated consequences"?

My thesis is that most technological achievements create at least as many problems as they solve. So many examples come to mind.

At best, all you end up doing is pushing the problem around, not solving it.

Technology doesn't create problems. It can't, it's technology. Humans otoh create plenty of problems. They may involve technology in their problem making, but in and of itself technology is benign. Humans otoh, tend not to be.

Claiming that the technological achievements create or solve any problems is more or less valid since that includes the human element, but again, the problems still aren't due to technology, they're due to people and their achievements, so to speak.

yesplease wrote:Technology doesn't create problems. It can't, it's technology. Humans otoh create plenty of problems. They may involve technology in their problem making, but in and of itself technology is benign. Humans otoh, tend not to be. Claiming that the technological achievements create or solve any problems is more or less valid since that includes the human element, but again, the problems still aren't due to technology, they're due to people and their achievements, so to speak.

Did you get a job as VP of the Hair Splitting Department?

So which comes first, yesplease, the chicken or the egg?

It makes no difference.

In any case, once created, many technologies or their impacts take on a life of their own that will have to be dealt with by people thousands of years from now (assuming there are people then). Like nuclear bombs or nuclear waste. Or CO2 emissions. Or PCBs. They don't sit there harmlessly, as you imply.

Heineken wrote: Like nuclear bombs or nuclear waste. Or CO2 emissions. Or PCBs.

Those aren't technology, they're achievements.

Ludi wrote:

Heineken wrote: Like nuclear bombs or nuclear waste. Or CO2 emissions. Or PCBs.

Those aren't technology, they're achievements.

No comprende. Splain, please.

VMarcHart wrote:Did you get a job as VP of the Hair Splitting Department?

Ah yes, it's all the fault of technology. Clearly if we were to resort to anarcho-primitivism w/ no technology, we wouldn't have any problems. IME in this forum, many posters love to blur lines in order to make various d00mcopian predictions.

Heineken wrote:So which comes first, yesplease, the chicken or the egg?

It makes no difference.

O.k. Now you're just trivializing the whole situation. Hell, I imagine that w/o arms and hands humans couldn't have done much in the way of technology, so clearly all arms and hands are to blame. So which comes first, Heineken, the arms/hands or the human?

It makes no difference.

Course, you presented something of a logical fallacy in the comparison, since the chicken needs the egg and the egg need the chicken to continue existing. Depending on the definition being human may require some level of technology, but technology can and has existed w/o humans.

Heineken wrote:In any case, once created, many technologies or their impacts take on a life of their own that will have to be dealt with by people thousands of years from now (assuming there are people then). Like nuclear bombs or nuclear waste. Or CO2 emissions. Or PCBs. They don't sit there harmlessly, as you imply.

That's the difference between...

tech·nol·o·gy
–noun
1. the branch of knowledge that deals with the creation and use of technical means and their interrelation with life, society, and the environment, drawing upon such subjects as industrial arts, engineering, applied science, and pure science.

And referring to the devices people create as technology. A nuclear bomb, PCB, or what have you can't up and make itself. It's a human decision to create Carbon emissions, PCBs, and/or nuclear weapons, and that is what's bad in this case or good in others. Technology can't make itself.

I just heard a big sucking sound. I think it's the sound of yesplease putting his foot into his mouth.

Do you realize you've just argued against your own position, yesplease?

How so?

Okay. But is that good news?

What must we do? by Wendell Berry
We must abandon the homeopathic delusion that the damages done by industrialization can be corrected by more industrialization.

Tried to post this on the 'fast crash' thread, but that is apparently closed. Will fit here also....Don Stewart
@those who like models and are averse to squabbling about gambling
Peak Oil and Information and Dopamine and GDP

A question posed by Mr. Hill’s graphs is why accumulated oil production and GDP has diverged from the historical relationship. I believe that a newly published book may shed some light on the subject: The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, by Gazzaley and Rosen. Gazzaley is a neuroscientist and Rosen is a psychologist.

We learn that primates get a dopamine response when they find information. So that a scientist can incent a primate to do something by giving more food, more sex, or more information. (Information here is crudely defined as bits and bytes, no distinction between signal and noise.) We also discover that humans have very recently greatly increased their consumption of information….to the detriment of being able to work toward goals. Which is a result of being ‘distracted’. The authors trace concern about distraction to books the MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle wrote as long ago as decades. (She was the wife of Seymour Papert, the information guru). In the news in the last couple of days and weeks has been influential people calling on Apple to make their products ‘less addictive’.

But if the average person is getting a dopamine hit every time they consult their smart phone (about every 6 or 7 waking minutes), then it's hard to think of exactly HOW one might go about discouraging the practice, and even more fundamentally WHY a profit maximizing corporation would do anything other than take full advantage of the addiction. All most people know is that they feel good when they do it.

‘single dopamine neurons process both primitive and cognitive rewards, and suggest that current theories of reward-seeking must be revised to include information-seeking’.

The Trails book that I mentioned recently notes that it was the telegraph and subsequent electronics which separated the movement of matter from the movement of information. When the stagecoach arrived and told the settlers that some Indians in war-paint were just outside town, the stagecoach and passengers and the information they carried all moved together. But add in a telegraph line and the information became separated from the movement of anything at all (electrons are infinitesimally small and sometimes they only move as waves).

The invention of the World Wide Web and spread spectrum which facilitated cell phones and the miniaturization of electronics separated the movement of information as never before. And everything related to information continued to get cheaper and cheaper. Between 1920 and 1980 the cost of sending information over distance asymptotically approached zero. Today, the notion of a ‘long distance call’ is extinct.

But the great reduction in cost also allowed the enormous proliferation of noise. While the ratio of signal to noise in the stagecoach was near 1 to 1, the ratio of signal to noise on the internet must be very small. Which leads the social media companies to begin to censor what we look at, allegedly for ‘our own good’.

A few observations about the implications of the above:
*If GDP measures hedonics (dopamine), then GDP can approach infinity as the cost of information (most of which is noise) falls.
*If GDP measures economic value, then the situation is trickier. An old saying among the internet pioneers was that ‘information wants to be free’. But ‘free’ has no economic value, because it is not scarce. At the present time, advertising is what overwhelmingly supports the cost of information. And an overwhelming percentage of the advertising is noise. But the noise generates dopamine.
*People in advanced countries now spend about a third of their time in distraction producing environments, including both work and leisure. Consequently, the ability to remain focused and get anything done toward changing the situation is very difficult. Rob Hopkins has recently written about this.
*Being distracted distracts from long term well-being, despite the fact that it is accompanied by short-term dopamine. This is like trying to persuade a child not to eat a cookie because someday they will be an old, fat diabetic with cancer.

Back in the real world, we know that the central banks have injected vast amounts of money into the global economy attempting to reflate it. See this chart from Charles Hugh Smith:
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjan18/CB ... t1-18.html

So our situation is quite uncertain as regards the relationships between money, GDP, the economy of hedonics, the economy of the production of commodities such as food or the movement of products across the landscape, and the general progress of the human race. Any historical models would have been built during the time when the costs of using the telephone were declining exponentially. But they would not reflect the very recent explosion of dopamine inducing noise.

Don Stewart