Hillmarsh

A lot of people will probably doubt this when living in the middle of the bubble. But it has happened elsewhere already. China's RE bubble has melted down spectacularly and their economy is still deflating despite massive government stimulus. I imagine this will be the fate of the American Everything Bubble too, albeit we can't know when it will happen. The last deflationary episode around 2014 coincided with the meltdown in the American shale oil industry, which as we well know is going to happen again with the decline of the Permian - maybe this will start the bubble bursting.

Low IQ people can't comprehend the science, but they are easy prey for demagogues who point out that the elites who tout climate change have no desire to limit their consumption or in any way live as if they believe climate change is real. Thus, they (the mob) come to believe they're simply being lied to and climate change is a "hoax". This is partly an elite problem because they're not willing to lead in the only way that might actually work, which is by example.

The worst is those people who bought houses out of town at the top of the real estate market because they believed the propaganda about WFH being permanent. However I never trusted C-level execs or directors not to renege on this, so I didn't do that.

Yeah and this whole agenda of RTO rolled out worldwide directly after Davos 2023 when a bunch of CEOs were tweeting about it from there. But noticing this makes you a conspiracy theorist.

In the old days people used to have their own servers...

And you can still buy them...

And the cloud really isn't cheaper...

But whatever, it's ubiquitous today. Maybe someday people will wake the F up.

God I hate Amazon now. They're basically Wal-Mart these days with half the results being sponsored (advertisements) - and you see that even if you pay for Prime. There are some things you can only get there, but otherwise, since all e-commerce is converging, I don't see the point of enabling their bad behavior. But whichever global corporate enterprise you take your business to, they will likely have a similar mindset.

It's underappreciated how much of a story this is. This is happening in wide swathes of the USA. Big chunks of the West are abandoned, because of wildfires, earthquakes, etc and all along the Gulf Coast as well, including big chunks of Florida (which tons of people have moved to in recent years).

You may be right. I keep assuming that Western politicians are smart people who are playing dumb for the public so that they can keep their grifts going. But they may not be playing in many cases. That might explain the rather sluggish response to what looks like a very serious crisis unfolding over the next 1-3 decades.

What I don't understand in our current situation is the lying. We're not attempting to transition to green energy because we have a choice, because it's better for the environment, or any of this. We're doing it because there aren't too many other options now that easily accessible fossil fuel is being burned up. What would be the harm, at this point, of just fessing up? It's most disconcerting that Western governments have gotten addicted to lying like this, even when they don't have to.

The song was about SoCal in the 1990s but it could equally apply to Florida or Texas circa now.

It has gotten to be dogma that "Malthus was proven wrong" on all sides of the mainstream's political spectrum. I always found that odd, because he didn't make any predictions. All of his work was based on historical data and known cases; he was very much a British empiricist. The only prediction in his essay, to the extent he made any, was that the principles wouldn't change in the future because of some nebulous "progress".

And they didn't. What happened instead, as the article rightly notes, is that we temporarily increased carrying capacity. And in so doing we built a trap for ourselves from which we won't be extricated in the coming decades. No one knows exactly how the trajectory of energy and resource descent will play out, but that it will happen, is happening now, is not in doubt.

The peak oil movement had another renaissance in the 2000s, but it went completely out of style about a decade ago. Most of the people who were aware of it like J.M. Greer, J.H. Kunstler and Dmitry Orlov, for example, just threw up their hands and stopped posting about it, because by that point no one outside of the subculture cared or intended to do anything about it. The "black pill" here, as I see it, is that we are just going to use it all up, whatever is accessible from the economic feasibility view anyway, and then suffer a traumatic economic disruption/contraction when it runs out.