Re: Let's First See if Human Life Is Sustainable On Earth _Then_ Do Mars
Rob Dekker
"Bret Cahill" <BretC...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:24ff1a68-6e5b-4cc2...@d4g2000prc.googlegroups.com...
> For the kind of money necessary for the Mars mission, we could
> electrify the entire Interstate Highway system and motor off the grid.
>
>
> Bret Cahill
>
Your comment does not directly reflect the subject of your post, although it
hints at maximizing energy efficiency, which is a good start for sustainable
living in the long run.
Looking at the rate that the human race has been devours this planet's
resources over the past 100 years, while growing exponentially in numbers,
it is not hard to imagine that our planet will show it's limits in the near
future.
Will the era of homo sapiens (man, the thinker) go into history as the
greatest devastation that the planet ever went through, or will we go
through this period of exponential growth and find some form of sustainable
lifestyle with intelligence and technology still intact ? If we make it
though, we may have enough time to kickstart sustainable colonies on other
planets, first in our own solar system and much later in neighboring
systems. If that works, we may be able to colonize the local neighborhood,
and ultimately the entire Galaxy.
If anyone has the thought that colonizing the Galaxy is likely or even
inevitable given our self-proclaimed superior intelligence and ability to
adapt, then maybe the Fermi paradox would offer a humbling realization : we
would be the first in this Galaxy of 300 billion star systems to do so, in
the 13 billion years that this Galaxy exists.
If the counterthought would be that we are alone or unique in some way, and
that we are the first in this Galaxy to make it to this point, then this
should be reason enough to be very careful with what we are doing. Very
careful with this planet, with it's resources and with it's ability to serve
us with food, energy and natural resources in a suustainable fashion.
After all, as far as we know, among the countless planets around the 300
billion stars in this Galaxy alone, Earth is the only planet with any life
at all.
Rob
Chris
power on their planet (I understand it is a colony not their planet of
origin).
--
Chris.
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"Rob Dekker" <r...@verific.com> wrote in message
news:h46k70$or8$1...@news.parasun.com...
Rod Speed
> Bret Cahill <BretC...@aol.com> wrote
>> For the kind of money necessary for the Mars mission, we could
>> electrify the entire Interstate Highway system and motor off the grid.
> Your comment does not directly reflect the subject of your post,
Corse it does.
> although it hints at maximizing energy efficiency, which is a good start for sustainable living in the long run.
> Looking at the rate that the human race has been devours this planet's resources over the past 100 years, while
> growing exponentially in numbers, it is not hard to imagine that our planet will show it's limits in the near future.
Only if you're silly enough to ignore nukes.
> Will the era of homo sapiens (man, the thinker) go into history as the greatest devastation that the planet ever went
> through,
Nope.
> or will we go through this period of exponential growth and find some form of sustainable lifestyle with
> intelligence and technology still intact ?
We already have.
> If we make it though,
We already have.
> we may have enough time to kickstart sustainable colonies on other planets,
No point, this planet is fine.
> first in our own solar system and much later in neighboring systems. If that works, we may be able to colonize the
> local neighborhood, and ultimately the entire Galaxy.
Or we may get enough of a clue to not bother.
> If anyone has the thought that colonizing the Galaxy is likely or even inevitable given our self-proclaimed superior
> intelligence and ability to adapt, then maybe the Fermi paradox would offer a humbling
> realization : we would be the first in this Galaxy of 300 billion star systems to do so, in the 13 billion years that
> this Galaxy exists.
You dont know that.
> If the counterthought would be that we are alone or unique in some
> way, and that we are the first in this Galaxy to make it to this point, then this should be reason enough to be very
> careful with what we are doing. Very careful with this planet, with it's resources and with it's ability to serve us
> with food, energy and natural resources in a suustainable fashion.
> After all, as far as we know, among the countless planets around the 300 billion stars in this Galaxy alone, Earth is
> the only planet with any life at all.
And what we know may well be a microscopic subset of reality.
Matt Giwer
> "Bret Cahill" <BretC...@aol.com> wrote in message
> news:24ff1a68-6e5b-4cc2...@d4g2000prc.googlegroups.com...
>> For the kind of money necessary for the Mars mission, we could
>> electrify the entire Interstate Highway system and motor off the grid.
> Your comment does not directly reflect the subject of your post, although it
> hints at maximizing energy efficiency, which is a good start for sustainable
> living in the long run.
> Looking at the rate that the human race has been devours this planet's
> resources over the past 100 years, while growing exponentially in numbers,
> it is not hard to imagine that our planet will show it's limits in the near
> future.
> Will the era of homo sapiens (man, the thinker) go into history as the
> greatest devastation that the planet ever went through, or will we go
> through this period of exponential growth and find some form of sustainable
> lifestyle with intelligence and technology still intact ? If we make it
> though, we may have enough time to kickstart sustainable colonies on other
> planets, first in our own solar system and much later in neighboring
> systems. If that works, we may be able to colonize the local neighborhood,
> and ultimately the entire Galaxy.
This entire idea of a sustainable economy is a nonsense term invented by tree
huggers.
A sustainable economy is easy to describe and it includes animals instead of
tractors as a trivial example. One can talk about renewable fuels for the
tractors to get some journalism majors to waste their time with you.
Fact is once there are tractors the entire chain of technology needed to make
tractors and everything that goes into them has to exist. Blacksmiths need not
apply. And that technology requires man power, bodies, large populations which
cannot be supported by any type of organic farming.
But do not worry. Antibiotics and vaccines take an equally wide range of
technologies including refrigeration and electricity and shipping and even
needles in the millions. That also requires a large population to maintain.
Anyone talking about a sustainable economy has to be living in a fantasy
world if he does not realize he is describing the technology of the late 18th
century minus the steam engine at best.
There is a solution and at the present time only one known solution. It is
called fission power plants. Without any new technology, and fusion or the
equivalent is the only alternative, the choice is nuclear power or the 1700s
without steam engines. If anyone takes a serious stance in favor of steam
engines, I will concede they are possible but not in the quantities needed to
replace all the trucks and cars and refrigerated cars. That still leaves them
to be loaded and unloaded with horse drawn wagons.
All the ways out that avoid the obvious are impossible Certainly super light
and super efficient cars are possible. But they are not possible without a
high level of technology at all levels and the people to operate that
technology. That requires them to be in production and not on the farm.
Farmers cannot feed a population that is 90% in the cities with horse drawn
plows. High tech cannot be a solution.
I have thought through most of the considerations. Anyone who thinks there is
a solution better than the 1700s with or without steam engines please feel
free to tell me about it. I do react poorly to handwaving and moral positions
and the like.
Of course fission has its drawbacks. So does the 18th century. It is not the
final solution. It simply replaces fossil fuels. That is important as a few
years ago the global melters got together with the peak oil folks and they
agreed we would run out of oil before we melt. So this is not something about
which there should be any treehugger disagreement. France and Japan are each
about 80% nuclear and at least the Japanese do not glow in the dark. You never
know about the French.
Yes, I know there are problems with decommissioning nuclear power plants. Are
they worse than strip mining and disposing of coal ash and all that CO2?
Anyway, I don't want to make this a sales pitch for nuclear and I hope it is
just an interim step to fusion.
The only point I hope to leave is that sustainable has consequences no
rational person would propose. Yes, I have read all the wonderland stories of
people who are living a sustainable life in their bewildered fantasy life. I
have yet to find a story of anyone who really is. A computer powered by wind
power? The infrastructure to make computers is not possible. Willing to give
that up? How many of those people weave their own cloth to make their clothes
and use 18th c. needles? Don't get me started on the shoes. I know there would
be division labor and trade in 18th c. terms but those people would not have
the free time to brag about being sustainable if they were growing the extra
food to trade to those who weave cloth. Preserving food for the winter? Who is
making canning jars and pressure cookers?
Certainly there are a few things which can be adapted from 19th c.
improvements to the 18th c. but not a single thing from the 20th.
--
We have learned from the religious riots in Israel that riots
are permitted on the Sabboth.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 4171
http://www.giwersworld.org/israel/bombings.phtml a5
Wed Jul 22 20:32:04 EDT 2009
Bret Cahill
> billion stars in this Galaxy alone, Earth is the only planet with any life
> at all.
I don't feel lonely.
We've been lucky not having a lot of jerks nearby. From what I hear
they have some pretty bad hombres in other parts of the universe.
Supposing you got near one of those galaxy shredding thingamajigs?
Then you are screwed.
Bret Cahill
Rob Dekker
Matt is active in sci.astro.seti.
He did not see your response, so I added that group again here.
But do not expect much of understanding your point of view...
I let him summarize his position, but I've had long discussions with him in
the past, regarding sustainability of civilisations, and did not get very
far. Good thing is that the discussions were never boring nor insulting.
Rob
"jim" <"sjedgingN0Sp"@m@mwt,net> wrote in message
news:qoCdnc0Lo98YxvXX...@bright.net...
> Your response indicates you have a very poor understanding of the
> mechanics and economics of both industry and farming.
>
> Sustainability has nothing to do with horses and tractors. It has to do
> with what in the long run will do you in and what won't. When it comes
> to farming the issue is survival of man. If you are a farmer and you
> don't practice sustainable farming methods than your farm does not
> survive. Modern farmers understand this a lot better than you do. And
> modern farmers also understand sustainability a lot better than most
> farmers did a 100 years ago.
>
> If you fly over Iowa today you will see that every farm you see is
> engaged in the practice of contour strip farming. A hundred years ago
> there were very few farmers that laid out their fields in contour
> strips. Why do farmers do that today? Because they understand that it is
> simply unsustainable to do otherwise. Without contour strips all the
> soil will end up washed away into the Gulf of Mexico.
>
> That certainly isn't the only change farmers have made to make their
> enterprise more sustainable. You ought to go to your local Agricultural
> university and investigate what is tought there. It may take you quite
> number of years to get up to speed on the state of the art of
> sustainability in farming.
> And it wouldn't hurt to take some engineering courses if you are
> interested in learning about sustainable industry also.
>
>
>
>
>>
>> But do not worry. Antibiotics and vaccines take an equally wide
>> range of
>> technologies including refrigeration and electricity and shipping and
>> even
>> needles in the millions. That also requires a large population to
>> maintain.
>>
>> Anyone talking about a sustainable economy has to be living in a
>> fantasy
>> world if he does not realize he is describing the technology of the late
>> 18th
>> century minus the steam engine at best.
>
> If it is farming of which you speak then the choice is simple: Develop
> a sustainable economy or face eventual starvation. No new technology for
> making food is going to be invented. Food is always going to mostly come
> from growing plants in the soil. If that process is not sustainable then
> man will at some point in time surely face starvation. Maybe not
> tomorrow maybe not even in a 100 years but eventually without
> sustainable economy it will be game over.
>
>
>>
>> There is a solution and at the present time only one known
>> solution. It is
>> called fission power plants. Without any new technology, and fusion or
>> the
>> equivalent is the only alternative, the choice is nuclear power or the
>> 1700s
>> without steam engines. If anyone takes a serious stance in favor of steam
>> engines, I will concede they are possible but not in the quantities
>> needed to
>> replace all the trucks and cars and refrigerated cars. That still leaves
>> them
>> to be loaded and unloaded with horse drawn wagons.
>
>
> [snipped rambling commentary]
>
>
>> Certainly there are a few things which can be adapted from 19th
>> c.
>> improvements to the 18th c. but not a single thing from the 20th.
>>
>
> Do you mean that the 20th century produced an American economy that only
> works well when oil is cheap and plentiful? And that economy today is
> particularly not well suited for the current realities?
>
> The American economy worked well in the 50's and 60's because of cheap
> easy to get oil. But anyone with half a brain should be able to see that
> this was not at all sustainable. But here we are some 30 years after it
> should have been declared clinically dead, still trying to prop up this
> dead horse of an economic model and make it run. The effort expended to
> do so has been almost totally counter productive.
>
> Had the nation acknowledged that an economy based on cheap free flowing
> oil is not sustainable and responded by artificially increasing the
> price of oil to some true sustainable level a long time ago, we wouldn't
> be in such a mess today. With a high tax on oil the economy would have
> many years ago arrived at much better solutions that are more
> sustainable just as farmers have come to adapt their more sustainable
> practices. But instead of doing that we deliberately burned are bridges
> behind so that pundits like your self can proclaim "see we have no
> choice we can't turn back or take any other course"
>
> At what point will you be willing to face the truth about
> Sustainability?
>
> -jim
Chris
in an atmosphere of vapour phase lithium. The lithium dimer sits inside the
quartz crystal forming a clathrate compound and over millions of years the
dilithium inclusions fuse forming carbon 14 and make the crystal vibrate.
If you put singing quartz inside the plates of a capacitor that is tuned
with a coil with a resonant frequency the same as the cut crystal the
combination gives of power that they use to power radios, lights, cars and
their homes as a suppliment to the windmill system.
Singing quartz occurs naturally on zeta where is is quite abundant but is
rare on Earth. It does occur in some cave formations in Austria. It is mined
there for its strange blue glow. The mines are nearly worked out now but
tourists can buy the stuff to power their quartz watches so I believe
instead of a battery.
It can be synthesized but I have no details of the process except that it is
grown in an atmosphere of lithium vapour.
These power crystals are also sold under the name of dilithium crystals.
I do not have any myself but the average zeta would not be without his
crystal powered stuff.
--
Chris.
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"Chris" <ns_cjrs@ns_chrisspages.co.uk> wrote in message
news:K6B9m.65296$OA1....@newsfe29.ams2...
Matt Giwer
> Jim,
> Matt is active in sci.astro.seti.
Where might active be? I'll chase after a rational discussion. Bible thumpers
are infesting s.history.ancient again with all the hassle that entails.
--
The Jews first appear in history in 67 BC.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 4155
http://www.giwersworld.org a1
Sat Jul 25 17:29:08 EDT 2009
Matt Giwer
I am the first do admit I don't know quite everything yet.
> Sustainability has nothing to do with horses and tractors. It has to do
> with what in the long run will do you in and what won't. When it comes
> to farming the issue is survival of man. If you are a farmer and you
> don't practice sustainable farming methods than your farm does not
> survive. Modern farmers understand this a lot better than you do. And
> modern farmers also understand sustainability a lot better than most
> farmers did a 100 years ago.
Yet today agriculture, by cultivated acreage, is almost exclusively energy
intensive corporate operations. From what I have read about sustainable its
foundation lies in not using non-renewable resources. Those are opposites.
> If you fly over Iowa today you will see that every farm you see is
> engaged in the practice of contour strip farming. A hundred years ago
> there were very few farmers that laid out their fields in contour
> strips. Why do farmers do that today? Because they understand that it is
> simply unsustainable to do otherwise. Without contour strips all the
> soil will end up washed away into the Gulf of Mexico.
If that is all there is to it, and as topsoil was never imported, what does
this have to do with sustainability? Everyone contours and the "crisis" is
over? I suspect there is more to it than that.
> That certainly isn't the only change farmers have made to make their
> enterprise more sustainable. You ought to go to your local Agricultural
> university and investigate what is tought there. It may take you quite
> number of years to get up to speed on the state of the art of
> sustainability in farming.
If one is just talking modern farming methods it is not clear what is meant
sustainable. Farming methods always change. The only hiatus farm production
regardless of method was the dust bowl to which farming methods only
marginally contributed.
> And it wouldn't hurt to take some engineering courses if you are
> interested in learning about sustainable industry also.
By way of introduction my degree is in physics and my career was in
engineering R&D although of the electronic kind. I am familiar with the
concepts of engineering. Which is why I made the point of the necessary
infrastructure to support everything we consider modern.
>> But do not worry. Antibiotics and vaccines take an equally wide
>> range of
>> technologies including refrigeration and electricity and shipping and
>> even needles in the millions. That also requires a large population to
>> maintain.
>> Anyone talking about a sustainable economy has to be living in a
>> fantasy
>> world if he does not realize he is describing the technology of the late
>> 18th century minus the steam engine at best.
> If it is farming of which you speak then the choice is simple: Develop
> a sustainable economy or face eventual starvation.
The point of my reply was to address the fundamental issue of sustainability,
energy from fossil fuels and raw materials. If what cannot be replaced is
being used that appears to be the definition of unsustainable.
> No new technology for
> making food is going to be invented. Food is always going to mostly come
> from growing plants in the soil. If that process is not sustainable then
> man will at some point in time surely face starvation. Maybe not
> tomorrow maybe not even in a 100 years but eventually without
> sustainable economy it will be game over.
Perhaps I was to brief. Food will always come from the soil, agreed. Food for
a particular size population will take a certain amount of acreage. To produce
what we need today for our population fraction of non-farmers takes everything
we currently use on farms from diesel fuel to synthetic fertilizer and all the
industry going into farm machinery as well as support industries like weather
forecasting. I do not suggest this is an inclusive list. None of this is
reduced by contour plowing.
What do you envision as sustainable that uses fossil fuels and irreplaceable
natural resources?
>> There is a solution and at the present time only one known
>> solution. It is
>> called fission power plants. Without any new technology, and fusion or
>> the
>> equivalent is the only alternative, the choice is nuclear power or the
>> 1700s
>> without steam engines. If anyone takes a serious stance in favor of steam
>> engines, I will concede they are possible but not in the quantities
>> needed to
>> replace all the trucks and cars and refrigerated cars. That still leaves
>> them
>> to be loaded and unloaded with horse drawn wagons.
> [snipped rambling commentary]
You mean this?
Certainly there are a few things which can be adapted from 19th c.
improvements to the 18th c. but not a single thing from the 20th.
Is it not courtesy to either address or not comment or simply indicate
deletion rather dismissively delete with derogatory comment?
>> Certainly there are a few things which can be adapted from 19th
>> c. improvements to the 18th c. but not a single thing from the 20th.
> Do you mean that the 20th century produced an American economy that only
> works well when oil is cheap and plentiful? And that economy today is
> particularly not well suited for the current realities?
It works only with high grade sources of energy, like it or not. Low level
distributed sources do not work. Aluminum refineries are built near
hydroelectric sources because of the quantity needed.
> The American economy worked well in the 50's and 60's because of cheap
> easy to get oil. But anyone with half a brain should be able to see that
> this was not at all sustainable. But here we are some 30 years after it
> should have been declared clinically dead, still trying to prop up this
> dead horse of an economic model and make it run. The effort expended to
> do so has been almost totally counter productive.
That is what I said above but you dismissed.
I added to that by saying there is no way to have our level of technology
without it. So it is starvation by unavoidable consequence as you note or by
choice of doing only what is sustainable.
> Had the nation acknowledged that an economy based on cheap free flowing
> oil is not sustainable and responded by artificially increasing the
> price of oil to some true sustainable level a long time ago, we wouldn't
> be in such a mess today.
Spilt milk is to be observed not bemoaned.
> With a high tax on oil
For a fact Europe makes much more money on oil simply by taxing it than the
producing countries do from selling it. It runs on the order of a euro or more
a liter. That would make taxes some 20 times greater than in the US. Europe
with those ridiculously high taxes is no better off than the US. As such high
taxes on oil do not make any difference.
> the economy would have
> many years ago arrived at much better solutions that are more
> sustainable just as farmers have come to adapt their more sustainable
> practices. But instead of doing that we deliberately burned are bridges
> behind so that pundits like your self can proclaim "see we have no
> choice we can't turn back or take any other course"
While it is all well and good to imagine alternate histories they are only a
value in good yarns for SF writers.
Europe was under greater incentive than the US due to those taxes you
incorrectly suggested would have fix things and "much better solutions" did
not appear in Europe.
> At what point will you be willing to face the truth about Sustainability?
I do not see what you mean by it that is different from what I wrote.
And as we agree on the issue of energy being the bottleneck I pointed out the
known proven solution is nuclear power even though it is still more expensive
than oil. Wind power was cheaper than oil for about a year but oil prices are
back down.
In the matter of wise taxation policy economics dictates general taxes are
not imposed to encourage what cannot be encouraged. We know the European taxes
on oil have not inspired any innovations. It has simply shifted some cost
tradeoffs away from oil. It might work in a pure technocracy but only in one.
When the US is firmly in the grip of the Jane Fonda school of nuclear physics
we are as far from a technocracy as we can get without going back to burning
witches.
We can either continue until oil is gone and fall into 18th c. or we can
choose to go back to the 19th c. But that was the last century of which did
not involve the depletion of non-renewable resources.
--
The nature of the Old Testament from a history of the Jewish people down to
a distorted story of their history has never been more than a religious
tradition with no known source, nor age, nor authenticity.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 4160
http://www.giwersworld.org/disinfo/occupied-2.phtml a6
Sat Jul 25 17:31:38 EDT 2009
Rod Speed
Quite a bit of its not all that energy intensive and not corporate operations either.
> From what I have read about sustainable its foundation lies in not using non-renewable resources. Those are opposites.
Nope, not when agriculture could use biodiesel to power it if it chose to.
It would also be possible to power agriculture using nukes too if it ever became necessary.
>> If you fly over Iowa today you will see that every farm you see is
>> engaged in the practice of contour strip farming. A hundred years ago
>> there were very few farmers that laid out their fields in contour
>> strips. Why do farmers do that today? Because they understand that
>> it is simply unsustainable to do otherwise. Without contour strips
>> all the soil will end up washed away into the Gulf of Mexico.
> If that is all there is to it, and as topsoil was never imported,
> what does this have to do with sustainability? Everyone contours and the "crisis" is over? I suspect there is more to
> it than that.
Corse there is. Some countrys do fine without the very deep soils seen in america.
>> That certainly isn't the only change farmers have made to make their
>> enterprise more sustainable. You ought to go to your local
>> Agricultural university and investigate what is tought there. It may
>> take you quite number of years to get up to speed on the state of
>> the art of sustainability in farming.
> If one is just talking modern farming methods it is not clear what is meant sustainable.
Sustainable basically means that its possible to keep doing it that way forever.
> Farming methods always change. The only hiatus farm production regardless of method was the dust bowl to which farming
> methods only marginally contributed.
Its more complicated than that with droughts etc.
>> And it wouldn't hurt to take some engineering courses if you are interested in learning about sustainable industry
>> also.
> By way of introduction my degree is in physics and my career was in engineering R&D although of the electronic kind. I
> am familiar with
> the concepts of engineering. Which is why I made the point of the
> necessary infrastructure to support everything we consider modern.
>>> But do not worry. Antibiotics and vaccines take an equally
>>> wide range of
>>> technologies including refrigeration and electricity and shipping
>>> and even needles in the millions. That also requires a large
>>> population to maintain.
>
>>> Anyone talking about a sustainable economy has to be living
>>> in a fantasy
>>> world if he does not realize he is describing the technology of the
>>> late 18th century minus the steam engine at best.
>
>> If it is farming of which you speak then the choice is simple:
>> Develop a sustainable economy or face eventual starvation.
> The point of my reply was to address the fundamental issue of
> sustainability, energy from fossil fuels and raw materials. If what
> cannot be replaced is being used that appears to be the definition of
> unsustainable.
Yes, but it doesnt have to be done that way.
>> No new technology for
>> making food is going to be invented. Food is always going to mostly
>> come from growing plants in the soil. If that process is not
>> sustainable then man will at some point in time surely face
>> starvation. Maybe not tomorrow maybe not even in a 100 years but
>> eventually without sustainable economy it will be game over.
> Perhaps I was to brief. Food will always come from the soil, agreed.
That is not in fact correct, most obviously with hydroponics
and food produced using industrial processes.
> Food for a particular size population will take a certain amount of acreage.
Not necessarily.
> To produce what we need today for our population fraction of
> non-farmers takes everything we currently use on farms from diesel
> fuel to synthetic fertilizer and all the industry going into farm
> machinery as well as support industries like weather forecasting. I
> do not suggest this is an inclusive list. None of this is reduced by
> contour plowing.
> What do you envision as sustainable that uses fossil fuels
You dont have to use fossil fuels.
> and irreplaceable natural resources?
None of those get used. They just get moved around.
We dont have to use aluminium.
Matt Giwer
I should not have said that. I was thinking of something I read only last
week putting corporate farming as 91%. But that was only one source and the
first time I have heard it was that high. I should have checked it from other
sources before using that generality.
>> From what I have read about sustainable its foundation lies in not
>> using non-renewable resources. Those are opposites.
> Nope, not when agriculture could use biodiesel to power it if it chose to.
I have no problem with using biodiesel. I raise the issue of producing diesel
engines and the tractors to use them requires a 20th c. level of technology.
> It would also be possible to power agriculture using nukes too if it ever
> became necessary.
The need for nuke power is my point. I don't see it tomorrow but batteries
are almost where we need them and they have the value of having high torque at
low RPM like diesels. The rate of battery improvement is accelerating.
Effective, not rated, lithium rechargeables are up more than 20% in the last
three years if I read it correctly. The rating itself is up 10%.
>>> If you fly over Iowa today you will see that every farm you see is
>>> engaged in the practice of contour strip farming. A hundred years ago
>>> there were very few farmers that laid out their fields in contour
>>> strips. Why do farmers do that today? Because they understand that
>>> it is simply unsustainable to do otherwise. Without contour strips
>>> all the soil will end up washed away into the Gulf of Mexico.
>> If that is all there is to it, and as topsoil was never imported,
>> what does this have to do with sustainability? Everyone contours and
>> the "crisis" is over? I suspect there is more to it than that.
> Corse there is. Some countrys do fine without the very deep soils seen
> in america.
Tongue was in cheek there. I read the ex-dust bowl soil is four inches before
hitting sand in virgin areas. It got the Anasazi where it hurt. We just got a
small taste in the 30s.
>>> That certainly isn't the only change farmers have made to make their
>>> enterprise more sustainable. You ought to go to your local
>>> Agricultural university and investigate what is tought there. It may
>>> take you quite number of years to get up to speed on the state of
>>> the art of sustainability in farming.
>> If one is just talking modern farming methods it is not clear what is
>> meant sustainable.
> Sustainable basically means that its possible to keep doing it that way
> forever.
Roughly my idea too.
>> Farming methods always change. The only hiatus farm production regardless
>> of method was the dust bowl to which farming
>> methods only marginally contributed.
> Its more complicated than that with droughts etc.
We know there are very long term weather cycles which the melting crowd likes
to blame on CO2. I love the folks saying the glaciers in the Alps are melting
as evidence. I read the arkie stuff. As the glaciers retreat cut logs and such
are being uncovered showing people lived there before the glaciers arrived.
Obviously there was no great disaster when glaciers melted the last time.
>>> And it wouldn't hurt to take some engineering courses if you are interested in learning about sustainable industry
>>> also.
>> By way of introduction my degree is in physics and my career was in engineering R&D although of the electronic kind. I
>> am familiar with
>> the concepts of engineering. Which is why I made the point of the
>> necessary infrastructure to support everything we consider modern.
>>>> But do not worry. Antibiotics and vaccines take an equally
>>>> wide range of
>>>> technologies including refrigeration and electricity and shipping
>>>> and even needles in the millions. That also requires a large
>>>> population to maintain.
>>>> Anyone talking about a sustainable economy has to be living
>>>> in a fantasy
>>>> world if he does not realize he is describing the technology of the
>>>> late 18th century minus the steam engine at best.
>>> If it is farming of which you speak then the choice is simple:
>>> Develop a sustainable economy or face eventual starvation.
>> The point of my reply was to address the fundamental issue of
>> sustainability, energy from fossil fuels and raw materials. If what
>> cannot be replaced is being used that appears to be the definition of
>> unsustainable.
> Yes, but it doesnt have to be done that way.
Avoiding it requires a reliable source of "concentrated" energy at an
affordable price. Things may cost more but we never have to do without
essentials. Even electric cars need lubrication. Synthetic oils cost more than
real oils but with reliable energy they can always be made no matter how dry
the wells.
This applies to all natural resources. We are not running out of any of them.
What we are running out of is sources of them at a particular cost of
extraction. Copper at one price determines the quality of ore needed to
produce it at a profit. At a higher price a lower grade ore is profitable. It
is all in the energy cost of extraction. This is the real supply and demand
idea not the crap economists mutter about.
We can run out of oil but we have breeder reactors so ignoring inflation nuke
power is a constant forever -- forever meaning far beyond the foreseeable
future. It is odd to see such an obvious thing governed by Jane Fonda.
>>> No new technology for
>>> making food is going to be invented. Food is always going to mostly
>>> come from growing plants in the soil. If that process is not
>>> sustainable then man will at some point in time surely face
>>> starvation. Maybe not tomorrow maybe not even in a 100 years but
>>> eventually without sustainable economy it will be game over.
>> Perhaps I was to brief. Food will always come from the soil, agreed.
> That is not in fact correct, most obviously with hydroponics
> and food produced using industrial processes.
Yes, that quibble ... ;)
But take a look at hydroponics. It still takes upon acreage and requires
greenhouses. Other than insect free and such it major advantage is year round
rather than seasonal production. I have not come across (have not looked for)
a cost analysis. What I have come across is the product costs a bit more and
the insect/pesticide free is a selling point to make up for the higher cost.
Same for organic farming. It costs more but people will pay extra for organic
for some reason.
The only really worthwhile organic farming I have seen was one place out in
back of a restaurant that grew its ingredients harvested fresh each day. (Damn
that Food Network for making me drool.) But for the life of me I can't taste a
difference in anything in the grocery.
I really did not try to write a treatise on the subject. I try to be
reasonable in stating positions.
>> Food for a particular size population will take a certain amount of acreage.
> Not necessarily.
What might be the difference as you see it?
If you mean going veggie that really does not work either. Grain is graded by
quality. People would not like eating the grain we feed to cattle.
>> To produce what we need today for our population fraction of
>> non-farmers takes everything we currently use on farms from diesel
>> fuel to synthetic fertilizer and all the industry going into farm
>> machinery as well as support industries like weather forecasting. I
>> do not suggest this is an inclusive list. None of this is reduced by
>> contour plowing.
>> What do you envision as sustainable that uses fossil fuels
> You dont have to use fossil fuels.
What is the alternative other than fission and eventually maybe fusion?
>> and irreplaceable natural resources?
> None of those get used. They just get moved around.
Yes, of course. It can't be expressed simply. In fact some 90% of our metal
(meaning by volume not by metal, meaning iron and aluminum overwhelm the
estimate, meaning one aluminum engine block is many thousand of cans) usage is
recycled and we add only roughly 10% per year. But there is always the
inevitable fraction that does not reach the recycling and recycling is not
100% efficient. I know of no study separating increasing demand and inevitable
losses from the system. Got anything better? Let me know.
The alternative is what? The world did not jump on aluminum to be
fashionable. It is used for its unique properties and utility.
Consider the beer/soda can. Making it of steel takes a specialized factory
near the end user as shipping finished cans means shipping a lot of air.
Producing aluminum cans is very much simpler and a decent size
brewery/whatever-soda-companies-are-called can build a production facility on
their property.
Given the state of hygiene not to mention all the costs of the old reusable
glass bottles I can make people sick of that idea of going back to them. I was
just a kid. All the cockroaches in them stacked out back of the store was fun.
I never even knew the cockroaches went inside the grocery. Bottle deposits
were to cover costs for breakage not to keep trash off the streets.
A steel airplane cannot get off the ground, almost literally. Aluminum in
cars is to reduce the energy requirement to move them.
Titanium is at least a decade away from being an alternative if what I read a
year ago was not a press release to pump the company's stock. It cannot be a
one for one replacement because of its own properties. It is much too hard for
use as cans. It is too strong for pop tops. (I should check before saying the
next but ...) Its weight and strength are ideal for engine blocks but its
thermal conductivity is not. But it makes great submarine hulls. Ask the
Russkies.
--
Hodie octavo Kalendas Augustas MMIX est
-- The Ferric Webcaesar
http://www.giwersworld.org/israel/bombings.phtml a5
Sat Jul 25 21:19:03 EDT 2009
jim
Matt Giwer wrote:
>
> > Sustainability has nothing to do with horses and tractors. It has to do
> > with what in the long run will do you in and what won't. When it comes
> > to farming the issue is survival of man. If you are a farmer and you
> > don't practice sustainable farming methods than your farm does not
> > survive. Modern farmers understand this a lot better than you do. And
> > modern farmers also understand sustainability a lot better than most
> > farmers did a 100 years ago.
>
> Yet today agriculture, by cultivated acreage, is almost exclusively energy
> intensive corporate operations. From what I have read about sustainable its
> foundation lies in not using non-renewable resources. Those are opposites.
I don't think it is fair to call it energy intensive. I think farming
has become much more efficient than other areas of the economy. In
general the whole economy fits your description of energy intensive
corporate operations. I mean look at how much of the economy consists of
people doing work that involves driving many miles to the work site and
sitting at a desk with telephone and computer, They could be doing that
work at home and saving all that energy and infrastructure that has been
built that serves little purpose but to consume energy.
Farmers don't drive to work. Farmers during WWII used a lot more fuel
per acre than they do today and they were fuel rationed. The trend is
definitely to become more fuel efficient and to use less and less
chemicals and fertilizer.
We all have been guilty of taking the easy way and using up
non-renewable resources because we have made it so easy and cheap to do
so.
>
> > If you fly over Iowa today you will see that every farm you see is
> > engaged in the practice of contour strip farming. A hundred years ago
> > there were very few farmers that laid out their fields in contour
> > strips. Why do farmers do that today? Because they understand that it is
> > simply unsustainable to do otherwise. Without contour strips all the
> > soil will end up washed away into the Gulf of Mexico.
>
> If that is all there is to it, and as topsoil was never imported, what does
> this have to do with sustainability?
Although soil was never imported a lot of it was "exported" due to
erosion. Being sustainable means being able to continue indefinitely. It
means always reinvesting so that you are living off the interest and not
the principal of your assets. The main asset of a farm is usually the
soil. 98% of the farms are still owned by families and that means they
think in terms of the long term multi-generational consequences of their
actions more than the average business does.
>Everyone contours and the "crisis" is
> over? I suspect there is more to it than that.
Yes I already said there is whole lot more to it, but the point I was
making is there is level of consciousness about making farming
sustainable that didn't exist in the past. I was pleasantly surprised
recently to see in a agricultural journal farmers bragging about the
number of earthworms (millions of worms/acre) in their cornfields. That
is pretty amazing because 30 years ago you would be lucky to find a
single earthworm in a typical midwestern cornfield. That represents a
huge difference in attitude. It is an attitude of working with nature
rather than against it.
>
> > That certainly isn't the only change farmers have made to make their
> > enterprise more sustainable. You ought to go to your local Agricultural
> > university and investigate what is tought there. It may take you quite
> > number of years to get up to speed on the state of the art of
> > sustainability in farming.
>
> If one is just talking modern farming methods it is not clear what is meant
> sustainable. Farming methods always change. The only hiatus farm production
> regardless of method was the dust bowl to which farming methods only
> marginally contributed.
No, actually from what i understand farming was the cause of the dust
bowl. That area was all grass land prior to farming and there never had
been any dust storms before the grasslands were all plowed under. All
those farmers ended broke and had to leave because there land literally
blew away. I don't have the figures handy, but the number of tons of
topsoil that blew away was staggering. That event had a huge impact on
research and promoting soil conservation on farms across the whole
nation.
>
> > And it wouldn't hurt to take some engineering courses if you are
> > interested in learning about sustainable industry also.
>
> By way of introduction my degree is in physics and my career was in
> engineering R&D although of the electronic kind. I am familiar with the
> concepts of engineering. Which is why I made the point of the necessary
> infrastructure to support everything we consider modern.
Yes but infrastructure or industry can take forms that are sustainable
or not. If you pollute that is not sustainable because eventually you
(or your decedents) will drown in your own pollution. Simply because
something is technical doesn't mean it is not sustainable.
>
> >> But do not worry. Antibiotics and vaccines take an equally wide
> >> range of
> >> technologies including refrigeration and electricity and shipping and
> >> even needles in the millions. That also requires a large population to
> >> maintain.
>
> >> Anyone talking about a sustainable economy has to be living in a
> >> fantasy
> >> world if he does not realize he is describing the technology of the late
> >> 18th century minus the steam engine at best.
>
> > If it is farming of which you speak then the choice is simple: Develop
> > a sustainable economy or face eventual starvation.
>
> The point of my reply was to address the fundamental issue of sustainability,
> energy from fossil fuels and raw materials. If what cannot be replaced is
> being used that appears to be the definition of unsustainable.
That is a narrow definition of sustainable and it is not even accurate.
We will always have fossil fuels. As they become more scarce they will
become more expensive and that will limit demand. Cheap oil is clearly
not sustainable for much longer. Cheap coal will also disappear
eventually but fossil fuels will be around indefinitely. One thing is
for certain when oil reaches $2000/barrel it will be used much more
wisely and prudently than it is today, so that is something to look
forward to.
This essentially the crux of the problem with sustainablility. We are
going to need resources to last forever but the value we put on them is
not at all designed to make them last for long. If we placed the
appropriate value on resources then that would make them last a long
time and at the same time it would encourage exploration of
alternatives.
>
> > No new technology for
> > making food is going to be invented. Food is always going to mostly come
> > from growing plants in the soil. If that process is not sustainable then
> > man will at some point in time surely face starvation. Maybe not
> > tomorrow maybe not even in a 100 years but eventually without
> > sustainable economy it will be game over.
>
> Perhaps I was to brief. Food will always come from the soil, agreed. Food for
> a particular size population will take a certain amount of acreage. To produce
> what we need today for our population fraction of non-farmers takes everything
> we currently use on farms from diesel fuel to synthetic fertilizer and all the
> industry going into farm machinery as well as support industries like weather
> forecasting. I do not suggest this is an inclusive list. None of this is
> reduced by contour plowing.
My point was that everything in industry that supports farming can be
changed, replaced or eliminated but the soil can't be replaced. If
there is a complete collapse of economic and industrial infrastructure,
then farming may be forced to go back to horses. But there is no reason
that industry can't be as sustainable as farming, eventually it will
become sustainable or it will die.
Currently people are not heading very fast towards sustainable
solutions because there is very little incentive to do so. But
ultimately we will start doing things in a sustainable way because the
alternative is to go out of business as a species and that real fact
will ultimately sink in.
>
> What do you envision as sustainable that uses fossil fuels and irreplaceable
> natural resources?
As I said at some price point we will continue to use some fossil fuels,
but probably not so much for energy. Energy is available. there is more
than enough coming from the sun that appears in plants, winds, tides or
directly with solar cells. We could be using the cheap energy we have
now to invest in the infrastructure for those more expensive forms. That
would be doing something sustainable instead of just burning it up and
then when it gets scarce and expensive we might actually be prepared for
that eventuality.
But your definition of sustainable is simply high-tech =
not-sustainable. I don't buy that definition.
We have structured things so that many new innovations are not
sustainable, but that is simply because it is more profitable in the
short term to invest in things that are not sustainable. That just
simply leads us from one unsustainable thing to the next. That
apparently has lead you to believe all technology is unsustainable.
>
> > Had the nation acknowledged that an economy based on cheap free flowing
> > oil is not sustainable and responded by artificially increasing the
> > price of oil to some true sustainable level a long time ago, we wouldn't
> > be in such a mess today.
>
> Spilt milk is to be observed not bemoaned.
Things haven't changed that much, nor will the be that different 30
years from now.
>
> > With a high tax on oil
>
> For a fact Europe makes much more money on oil simply by taxing it than the
> producing countries do from selling it. It runs on the order of a euro or more
> a liter. That would make taxes some 20 times greater than in the US. Europe
> with those ridiculously high taxes is no better off than the US. As such high
> taxes on oil do not make any difference.
How do you conclude they are no better off? For one thing they don't
have a huge expensive transportation infrastructure that is quickly
becoming an albatross. They have rail systems that are significantly
more sustainable than the US. People in the US are going to be asking
why don't we have a rail system when the price of oil gets to
$200/barrel. In all likelihood Europe's petroleum taxes would be even
higher but the US undermines and drags the whole world in that respect.
down
>
> > the economy would have
> > many years ago arrived at much better solutions that are more
> > sustainable just as farmers have come to adapt their more sustainable
> > practices. But instead of doing that we deliberately burned are bridges
> > behind so that pundits like your self can proclaim "see we have no
> > choice we can't turn back or take any other course"
>
> While it is all well and good to imagine alternate histories they are only a
> value in good yarns for SF writers.
In the coming future we are going to have to make do with expensive
petroleum. is so far-fetched to say we would be better off had we some
practice?
>
> Europe was under greater incentive than the US due to those taxes you
> incorrectly suggested would have fix things and "much better solutions" did
> not appear in Europe.
I disagree. But we haven't got to the point in history where we can say
for sure. but it sure looks to me like Europe is in a much better
position that the US to deal with $200/barrel oil when it arrives to
stay.
>
> > At what point will you be willing to face the truth about Sustainability?
>
> I do not see what you mean by it that is different from what I wrote.
>
> And as we agree on the issue of energy being the bottleneck I pointed out the
> known proven solution is nuclear power even though it is still more expensive
> than oil. Wind power was cheaper than oil for about a year but oil prices are
> back down.
Nuclear or wind or whatever they are all strictly economic issues.
there is nothing been preventing investors from building nuclear plants
in the last 30 years, but they haven't. Three mile island did that. Not
because it was an environmental disaster but because it was an economic
disaster. Nobody wants the risk in nuclear when you can invest in Coal
or gas plants that make you the same return with essentially no risk.
>
> In the matter of wise taxation policy economics dictates general taxes are
> not imposed to encourage what cannot be encouraged. We know the European taxes
> on oil have not inspired any innovations.
You mean like a fleet of cars that get much better gas mileage is not
innovation? And there is European rail system. Those sorts of things are
going to pay off when the price of oil goes up. The only way their
higher taxes doesn't make sense is if the price of oil never goes up
substantially. They are prepared for that we aren't. When it comes to
stay we will see what shakes out.
> It has simply shifted some cost
> tradeoffs away from oil. It might work in a pure technocracy but only in one.
> When the US is firmly in the grip of the Jane Fonda school of nuclear physics
> we are as far from a technocracy as we can get without going back to burning
> witches.
The US would have built dozens of Nuclear plants if cheap oil and a tax
system that rewards short term investments hadn't made it economically
unattractive. A lack of investment is what has prevented Nuclear. That
is another thing that Europe's energy tax strategy has put them in a
better position then the US.
>
> We can either continue until oil is gone and fall into 18th c. or we can
> choose to go back to the 19th c. But that was the last century of which did
> not involve the depletion of non-renewable resources.
That just makes no sense to me. Where are you getting your history. The
19th century is full of wasteful and rampant distruction of resources. A
major source of light used to be whale oil till the whales were gone and
we wiped the millions of buffalo that roamed the plains and chopped
down all the forests east of the Mississippi and on and on. There was
nothing sustainable at all about the 19th century. But then at the end
of that century along came petroleum and that saved us from all that
previous stupidity. We would have been in really rough shape if not for
the arrival of oil.
-jim
Rod Speed
> Matt Giwer wrote:
>
>>
>>> Sustainability has nothing to do with horses and tractors. It has
>>> to do with what in the long run will do you in and what won't. When
>>> it comes to farming the issue is survival of man. If you are a
>>> farmer and you don't practice sustainable farming methods than your
>>> farm does not survive. Modern farmers understand this a lot better
>>> than you do. And modern farmers also understand sustainability a
>>> lot better than most farmers did a 100 years ago.
>>
>> Yet today agriculture, by cultivated acreage, is almost
>> exclusively energy intensive corporate operations. From what I have
>> read about sustainable its foundation lies in not using
>> non-renewable resources. Those are opposites.
> I don't think it is fair to call it energy intensive. I think farming
> has become much more efficient than other areas of the economy.
We'll see...
> In general the whole economy fits your description of energy intensive
> corporate operations. I mean look at how much of the economy consists
> of people doing work that involves driving many miles to the work
> site and sitting at a desk with telephone and computer, They could
> be doing that work at home and saving all that energy
Plenty do just that.
> and infrastructure that has been built that
> serves little purpose but to consume energy.
> Farmers don't drive to work.
Quite a few do just that.
> Farmers during WWII used a lot more fuel per acre than they do today
Bullshit.
> and they were fuel rationed. The trend is definitely to become
> more fuel efficient and to use less and less chemicals and fertilizer.
> We all have been guilty of taking the easy way and using up
> non-renewable resources because we have made it so easy and cheap to
> do so.
>>> If you fly over Iowa today you will see that every farm you see is
>>> engaged in the practice of contour strip farming. A hundred years
>>> ago there were very few farmers that laid out their fields in
>>> contour strips. Why do farmers do that today? Because they
>>> understand that it is simply unsustainable to do otherwise. Without
>>> contour strips all the soil will end up washed away into the Gulf
>>> of Mexico.
>> If that is all there is to it, and as topsoil was never
>> imported, what does this have to do with sustainability?
> Although soil was never imported
Corse it is, most obviously with alluvial land.
Nope, the drought was.
> That area was all grass land prior to farming and there never had
> been any dust storms before the grasslands were all plowed under.
Wrong.
> All those farmers ended broke and had to leave because there land literally blew away.
Never happened.
> I don't have the figures handy, but the number
> of tons of topsoil that blew away was staggering.
But no one had to leave because all of it had blown away.
> That event had a huge impact on research and promoting
> soil conservation on farms across the whole nation.
Separate matter entirely.
>>> And it wouldn't hurt to take some engineering courses if you are
>>> interested in learning about sustainable industry also.
>> By way of introduction my degree is in physics and my career
>> was in engineering R&D although of the electronic kind. I am
>> familiar with the
>> concepts of engineering. Which is why I made the point of the
>> necessary infrastructure to support everything we consider modern.
> Yes but infrastructure or industry can take forms that are sustainable
> or not. If you pollute that is not sustainable because eventually you
> (or your decedents) will drown in your own pollution.
Wrong. Didnt happen with the industrial revolution.
> Simply because something is technical doesn't mean it is not sustainable.
>>>> But do not worry. Antibiotics and vaccines take an equally
>>>> wide range of
>>>> technologies including refrigeration and electricity and shipping
>>>> and even needles in the millions. That also requires a large
>>>> population to maintain.
>>>> Anyone talking about a sustainable economy has to be
>>>> living in a fantasy
>>>> world if he does not realize he is describing the technology of
>>>> the late 18th century minus the steam engine at best.
>>> If it is farming of which you speak then the choice is simple:
>>> Develop a sustainable economy or face eventual starvation.
>> The point of my reply was to address the fundamental issue
>> of sustainability, energy from fossil fuels and raw materials. If
>> what cannot be replaced is
>> being used that appears to be the definition of unsustainable.
> That is a narrow definition of sustainable and it is not even
> accurate. We will always have fossil fuels. As they become more
> scarce they will become more expensive and that will limit demand.
> Cheap oil is clearly not sustainable for much longer. Cheap coal will
> also disappear eventually
Not necessarily, particularly if we change to using nukes
for power generation because that fixes the CO2 problem.
> but fossil fuels will be around indefinitely. One thing
> is for certain when oil reaches $2000/barrel
Wont happen.
> it will be used much more wisely and prudently than
> it is today, so that is something to look forward to.
Taint gunna happen. Didnt happen with coal before oil was used in significant quantitys.
> This essentially the crux of the problem with sustainablility.
Nope.
> We are going to need resources to last forever but the value
> we put on them is not at all designed to make them last for long.
Not all resources need that approach. Many of them are recycled endlessly.
> If we placed the appropriate value on resources then that would make them last
> a long time and at the same time it would encourage exploration of alternatives.
That will happen automatically if the availability of them does become a problem.
>>> No new technology for
>>> making food is going to be invented. Food is always going to mostly
>>> come from growing plants in the soil. If that process is not
>>> sustainable then man will at some point in time surely face
>>> starvation. Maybe not tomorrow maybe not even in a 100 years but
>>> eventually without sustainable economy it will be game over.
>> Perhaps I was to brief. Food will always come from the soil,
>> agreed. Food for a particular size population will take a certain
>> amount of acreage. To produce
>> what we need today for our population fraction of non-farmers takes
>> everything
>> we currently use on farms from diesel fuel to synthetic fertilizer
>> and all the industry going into farm machinery as well as support
>> industries like weather forecasting. I do not suggest this is an
>> inclusive list. None of this is
>> reduced by contour plowing.
> My point was that everything in industry that supports farming can
> be changed, replaced or eliminated but the soil can't be replaced.
Doesnt need to be, most of it isnt going anywhere.
> If there is a complete collapse of economic and industrial
> infrastructure, then farming may be forced to go back to horses.
Not a chance. The most that might be necessary is biodiesel etc.
But we didnt even see complete collapse of economic
and industrial infrastructure during two world wars and
a great depression, so it aint gunna happen.
> But there is no reason that industry can't be as sustainable
> as farming, eventually it will become sustainable or it will die.
Or it just becomes obsolete like buggy whip manufacture.
> Currently people are not heading very fast towards sustainable
> solutions because there is very little incentive to do so. But
> ultimately we will start doing things in a sustainable way
> because the alternative is to go out of business as a species
Like hell it is.
> and that real fact will ultimately sink in.
It aint anything like a fact, real or otherwise.
>> What do you envision as sustainable that uses
>> fossil fuels and irreplaceable natural resources?
> As I said at some price point we will continue to use some
> fossil fuels, but probably not so much for energy. Energy is
> available.there is more than enough coming from the sun
> that appears in plants, winds, tides or directly with solar
> cells. We could be using the cheap energy we have now
> to invest in the infrastructure for those more expensive forms.
No need, we can build nukes when they make economic and practical sense.
> That would be doing something sustainable instead
> of just burning it up and then when it gets scarce and
> expensive we might actually be prepared for that eventuality.
No need to bother. The research has mostly been
done and we can use it any time it makes sense.
Your problem.
> We have structured things so that many new innovations are not sustainable,
Hardly any in fact.
> but that is simply because it is more profitable in the
> short term to invest in things that are not sustainable. That just
> simply leads us from one unsustainable thing to the next. That
> apparently has lead you to believe all technology is unsustainable.
He never said anything like that last.
>>> Had the nation acknowledged that an economy based on cheap
>>> free flowing oil is not sustainable and responded by artificially
>>> increasing the price of oil to some true sustainable level a long
>>> time ago, we wouldn't be in such a mess today.
>> Spilt milk is to be observed not bemoaned.
> Things haven't changed that much,
Mindlessly silly with computers.
> nor will the be that different 30 years from now.
Thats what plenty said about computers.
>>> With a high tax on oil
>> For a fact Europe makes much more money on oil simply by
>> taxing it than the producing countries do from selling it. It runs
>> on the order of a euro or more
>> a liter. That would make taxes some 20 times greater than in the US.
>> Europe
>> with those ridiculously high taxes is no better off than the US. As
>> such high
>> taxes on oil do not make any difference.
> How do you conclude they are no better off?
From the fact that they have precisely the same problems with respect to oil that the US does.
> For one thing they don't have a huge expensive transportation
> infrastructure that is quickly becoming an albatross.
Like hell they dont.
> They have rail systems that are significantly more sustainable than the US.
But most of them dont use those any more than say New York does.
> People in the US are going to be asking why don't we have
> a rail system when the price of oil gets to $200/barrel.
Then it can be built when it does make sense.
Much of europe's rail infrastructure has been scrapped already.
> In all likelihood Europe's petroleum taxes would be even higher but
> the US undermines and drags the whole world in that respect. down
Mindlessly silly.
>>> the economy would have
>>> many years ago arrived at much better solutions that are more
>>> sustainable just as farmers have come to adapt their more
>>> sustainable practices. But instead of doing that we deliberately
>>> burned are bridges behind so that pundits like your self can
>>> proclaim "see we have no choice we can't turn back or take any
>>> other course"
>> While it is all well and good to imagine alternate histories
>> they are only a value in good yarns for SF writers.
> In the coming future we are going to have to make do with expensive petroleum.
Completely routine to change to using natural gas instead.
Not much harder to change to using hydrogen from nukes when that makes sense.
> is so far-fetched to say we would be better off had we some practice?
Yep, dont need any practice, plenty are using natural gas for cars right now.
Some are generating 95% of their electricity using nukes right now.
Thats plenty enough 'practice'
>> Europe was under greater incentive than the US due to
>> those taxes you incorrectly suggested would have fix
>> things and "much better solutions" did not appear in Europe.
> I disagree.
Your problem.
> But we haven't got to the point in history where we can say for sure.
Wrong.
> but it sure looks to me like Europe is in a much better position
> that the US to deal with $200/barrel oil when it arrives to stay.
You're wrong. It doesnt have anything like as much natural
gas or coal or shale oil or tar sands as north america does.
>>> At what point will you be willing to face the truth about Sustainability?
>> I do not see what you mean by it that is different from what I wrote.
>> And as we agree on the issue of energy being the bottleneck
>> I pointed out the known proven solution is nuclear power even though
>> it is still more expensive than oil. Wind power was cheaper
>> than oil for about a year but oil prices are back down.
> Nuclear or wind or whatever they are all strictly economic
> issues. there is nothing been preventing investors from
> building nuclear plants in the last 30 years, but they haven't.
They have in France and Japan, and that isnt because of the tax on oil.
> Three mile island did that. Not because it was an environmental
> disaster but because it was an economic disaster.
It wasnt an economic disaster.
> Nobody wants the risk in nuclear when you can invest in Coal or
> gas plants that make you the same return with essentially no risk.
Have fun explaining France and Japan.
>> In the matter of wise taxation policy economics
>> dictates general taxes are not imposed to encourage
>> what cannot be encouraged. We know the European
>> taxes on oil have not inspired any innovations.
> You mean like a fleet of cars that get much better gas mileage is not innovation?
Taint due to their tax on oil.
> And there is European rail system.
Taint due to their tax on oil. Its just a much higher population density area.
The highest population density areas of the US have just as
much rail as western europe, most obviously with New York.
> Those sorts of things are going to pay off when the price of oil goes up.
Nope, because we will change to natural gas instead.
> The only way their higher taxes doesn't make sense is if the price of
> oil never goes up substantially. They are prepared for that we aren't.
Pig ignorant lie. They've scrapped a lot of their rail infrastructure.
> When it comes to stay we will see what shakes out.
The US will change to using natural gas and stop wasting most of what it
consumes today heating and do that using electricity from nukes, you watch.
>> It has simply shifted some cost tradeoffs away from oil.
>> It might work in a pure technocracy but only in one.
>> When the US is firmly in the grip of the Jane Fonda
>> school of nuclear physics we are as far from a technocracy
>> as we can get without going back to burning witches.
> The US would have built dozens of Nuclear plants if cheap
> oil and a tax system that rewards short term investments
> hadn't made it economically unattractive.
Wrong. Cheap oil has nothing to do with coal being used for power generation.
> A lack of investment is what has prevented Nuclear.
The lack of govt encouragement of nukes what has actually prevented the use of nukes in the US.
> That is another thing that Europe's energy tax
> strategy has put them in a better position then the US.
Mindlessly silly. Some european countrys have
actually been stupid enough to proscribe nukes,
by far the most sensible way to generate electricity.
>> We can either continue until oil is gone and fall into 18th
>> c. or we can choose to go back to the 19th c. But that
>> was the last century of which did not involve the
>> depletion of non-renewable resources.
> That just makes no sense to me. Where are you getting your history.
> The 19th century is full of wasteful and rampant distruction of
> resources. A major source of light used to be whale oil till the whales
> were gone and we wiped the millions of buffalo that roamed the plains
Those werent a 'resource'
> and chopped down all the forests east of the Mississippi and on and
> on. There was nothing sustainable at all about the 19th century. But
> then at the end of that century along came petroleum and that saved
> us from all that previous stupidity. We would have been in really
> rough shape if not for the arrival of oil.
Nope, it would have worked fine with coal.
Rod Speed
They're basically talking about the tax structure used, a corp in a tax
sense. The bulk of them are still family owned, so very small corps in fact.
>>> From what I have read about sustainable its foundation lies in not using non-renewable resources. Those are
>>> opposites.
>> Nope, not when agriculture could use biodiesel to power it if it chose to.
> I have no problem with using biodiesel. I raise the issue of producing diesel engines and the tractors to use them
> requires a 20th c. level of technology.
The production of those engines and tractors can be done quite sustainably.
>> It would also be possible to power agriculture using nukes too if it ever became necessary.
> The need for nuke power is my point.
I was just commenting on the sustainability stuff there.
> I don't see it tomorrow but batteries are almost where we need them
Nope. Still woefully inadequate for cars and trucks and tractors in spades.
> and they have the value of having high torque at low RPM like diesels. The rate of battery improvement is
> accelerating.
Thats very arguable.
> Effective, not rated, lithium rechargeables are up more than 20% in the last three years if I read it correctly. The
> rating itself is up 10%.
If we do end up using nukes for agriculture, its more likely
to be done using hydrogen from nukes instead of batterys.
But there isnt any real need to go that route any time soon.
It makes a lot more sense to stop wasting natural gas heating
and do the heating with electricity from nukes instead and use
the natural gas as a transport fuel in most engines and biodiesel
where that makes sense.
That way the gross abuse of resources that batterys involve isnt necessary.
>>>> If you fly over Iowa today you will see that every farm you see is
>>>> engaged in the practice of contour strip farming. A hundred years ago there were very few farmers that laid out
>>>> their fields in contour
>>>> strips. Why do farmers do that today? Because they understand that
>>>> it is simply unsustainable to do otherwise. Without contour strips
>>>> all the soil will end up washed away into the Gulf of Mexico.
>>> If that is all there is to it, and as topsoil was never imported,
>>> what does this have to do with sustainability? Everyone contours and the "crisis" is over? I suspect there is more
>>> to it than that.
>> Corse there is. Some countrys do fine without the very deep soils seen in america.
> Tongue was in cheek there.
Yeah, that was obvious, I just chose to make that point there where it fitted.
> I read the ex-dust bowl soil is four inches before hitting sand in virgin areas.
Thats a lie in the bulk of america.
> It got the Anasazi where it hurt. We just got a small taste in the 30s.
Its much more complicated than that.
They had a permanent problem, the dust bowl was only temporary.
>>>> That certainly isn't the only change farmers have made to make
>>>> their enterprise more sustainable. You ought to go to your local
>>>> Agricultural university and investigate what is tought there. It may take you quite number of years to get up to
>>>> speed on the state of
>>>> the art of sustainability in farming.
>>> If one is just talking modern farming methods it is not clear what is meant sustainable.
>> Sustainable basically means that its possible to keep doing it that way forever.
> Roughly my idea too.
>>> Farming methods always change. The only hiatus farm production
>>> regardless of method was the dust bowl to which farming
>>> methods only marginally contributed.
>> Its more complicated than that with droughts etc.
> We know there are very long term weather cycles which the melting
> crowd likes to blame on CO2. I love the folks saying the glaciers in
> the Alps are melting as evidence. I read the arkie stuff. As the
> glaciers retreat cut logs and such are being uncovered showing people
> lived there before the glaciers arrived. Obviously there was no great
> disaster when glaciers melted the last time.
We did see some very dramatic rises in sea level, hundreds of feet in fact.
That would cause significantly more problems now than it did then.
>>>> And it wouldn't hurt to take some engineering courses if you are interested in learning about sustainable industry
>>>> also.
>>> By way of introduction my degree is in physics and my career was in
>>> engineering R&D although of the electronic kind. I am familiar with
>>> the concepts of engineering. Which is why I made the point of the
>>> necessary infrastructure to support everything we consider modern.
>>>>> But do not worry. Antibiotics and vaccines take an equally
>>>>> wide range of
>>>>> technologies including refrigeration and electricity and shipping
>>>>> and even needles in the millions. That also requires a large
>>>>> population to maintain.
>>>>> Anyone talking about a sustainable economy has to be
>>>>> living in a fantasy
>>>>> world if he does not realize he is describing the technology of
>>>>> the late 18th century minus the steam engine at best.
>>>> If it is farming of which you speak then the choice is simple:
>>>> Develop a sustainable economy or face eventual starvation.
>>> The point of my reply was to address the fundamental issue of
>>> sustainability, energy from fossil fuels and raw materials. If what
>>> cannot be replaced is being used that appears to be the definition
>>> of unsustainable.
>> Yes, but it doesnt have to be done that way.
> Avoiding it requires a reliable source of "concentrated" energy at an affordable price.
Yes, but there is no possibility that that wont
continue forever now that we have invented nukes.
At worst we can use the nukes to produce the concentrated
energy in a form which we need it, even if that needs to be
done by turning coal into a liquid fuel etc.
> Things may cost more but we never have to do without
> essentials. Even electric cars need lubrication. Synthetic oils cost more than real oils but with reliable energy they
> can always be made no matter how dry the wells.
Yep, now that we have invented nukes, all we need is a source
of carbon atoms and that can even be agriculture if necessary.
We've fixed that problem forever now.
> This applies to all natural resources. We are not running out of any of them. What we are running out of is sources of
> them at a particular cost of extraction.
And most of them arent even consumed, just moved around.
> Copper at one price determines the quality of ore needed to produce it at a profit. At a higher price a lower grade
> ore is profitable. It is all in the energy cost of extraction. This is the real supply and demand idea not the crap
> economists mutter about.
Indeed.
> We can run out of oil but we have breeder reactors so ignoring
> inflation nuke power is a constant forever -- forever meaning far beyond the foreseeable future. It is odd to see such
> an obvious thing governed by Jane Fonda.
It isnt in the countrys with a clue like France and Japan.
Even america will get a clue when its necessary.
>>>> No new technology for
>>>> making food is going to be invented. Food is always going to mostly
>>>> come from growing plants in the soil. If that process is not
>>>> sustainable then man will at some point in time surely face
>>>> starvation. Maybe not tomorrow maybe not even in a 100 years but
>>>> eventually without sustainable economy it will be game over.
>>> Perhaps I was to brief. Food will always come from the soil, agreed.
>> That is not in fact correct, most obviously with hydroponics
>> and food produced using industrial processes.
> Yes, that quibble ... ;)
> But take a look at hydroponics. It still takes upon acreage
Yes, but that can be acreage thats no use for anything else. Rock in fact.
> and requires greenhouses.
No it doesnt.
> Other than insect free and such it major advantage is year round rather than seasonal production. I have not come
> across (have not looked for) a cost analysis. What I have come across is the product costs a bit more and the
> insect/pesticide free is a selling point to make up for the higher cost. Same for organic farming. It costs more but
> people will pay extra for organic for some reason.
> The only really worthwhile organic farming I have seen was one place
> out in back of a restaurant that grew its ingredients harvested fresh
> each day. (Damn that Food Network for making me drool.) But for the life of me I can't taste a difference in anything
> in the grocery.
> I really did not try to write a treatise on the subject. I try to be reasonable in stating positions.
>>> Food for a particular size population will take a certain amount of acreage.
>> Not necessarily.
> What might be the difference as you see it?
Greenhouses are an example of much more intensive agriculture.
> If you mean going veggie that really does not work either. Grain is graded by quality. People would not like eating
> the grain we feed to cattle.
They do actually. Hordes now eat what used to almost
exclusively be fed to cattle for the alleged health benefits.
>>> To produce what we need today for our population fraction of
>>> non-farmers takes everything we currently use on farms from diesel
>>> fuel to synthetic fertilizer and all the industry going into farm
>>> machinery as well as support industries like weather forecasting. I
>>> do not suggest this is an inclusive list. None of this is reduced by
>>> contour plowing.
>>> What do you envision as sustainable that uses fossil fuels
>> You dont have to use fossil fuels.
> What is the alternative other than fission and eventually maybe fusion?
I was talking about fission there.
>>> and irreplaceable natural resources?
>> None of those get used. They just get moved around.
> Yes, of course. It can't be expressed simply. In fact some 90% of our
> metal (meaning by volume not by metal, meaning iron and aluminum
> overwhelm the estimate, meaning one aluminum engine block is many
> thousand of cans) usage is recycled and we add only roughly 10% per
> year. But there is always the inevitable fraction that does not reach
> the recycling and recycling is not 100% efficient. I know of no study
> separating increasing demand and inevitable losses from the system.
But those loses arent a problem sustainability wise.
> The alternative is what?
Steel, stainless or otherwise.
> The world did not jump on aluminum to be fashionable. It is used for its unique properties and utility.
It isnt ever irreplaceable.
> Consider the beer/soda can. Making it of steel takes a specialized
> factory near the end user as shipping finished cans means shipping a
> lot of air. Producing aluminum cans is very much simpler and a decent
> size brewery/whatever-soda-companies-are-called can build a
> production facility on their property.
The obvious alternative is PET and even glass.
> Given the state of hygiene not to mention all the costs of the old reusable glass bottles I can make people sick of
> that idea of going back to them.
No you cant. I go that route myself, and PET.
> I was just a kid. All the cockroaches in them stacked out back of the store was fun. I never even knew the cockroaches
> went inside the grocery. Bottle deposits were to cover costs for breakage not to keep trash off the streets.
I put them in the dishwasher after they are emptied and the
cockroaches arent interested in them when they are clean.
> A steel airplane cannot get off the ground, almost literally.
That is just plain wrong. And modern composites
work even better than aluminium anyway.
> Aluminum in cars is to reduce the energy requirement to move them.
And they work fine when made of steel.
> Titanium is at least a decade away from being an alternative if what
> I read a year ago was not a press release to pump the company's stock.
It was.
> It cannot be a one for one replacement because of its own properties.
one for one is irrelevant. Its being replaced anyway.
> It is much too hard for use as cans.
Society would carry on regardless without any aluminum cans.
> It is too strong for pop tops.
Steel works fine.
> (I should check before saying the next but ...) Its weight and strength are ideal for engine blocks but its thermal
> conductivity
> is not. But it makes great submarine hulls. Ask the Russkies.
Such a tiny part of techmology that its completely irrelevant.
jim
Matt Giwer wrote:
>
> >> Food for a particular size population will take a certain amount of acreage.
>
> > Not necessarily.
>
> What might be the difference as you see it?
>
> If you mean going veggie that really does not work either. Grain is graded by
> quality. People would not like eating the grain we feed to cattle.
That is false. If everyone in the US decided to stop eating meat, there
is no reason to believe there would need to be any degradation of the
quality of grain people eat - You just made that up out of thin air. I'm
not advocating veggie, just pointing out your arguments are based on
stuff you make up to support what you like.
For instance Americans consume only about 10% of the corn grown in the
US. The difference in the corn that goes to human consumption is mostly
just processing. The grade of corn for human consumption has much less
broken and immature kernels and much less foreign matter like weed seeds
and dirt. But the vast majority of the corn that isn't used for human
consumption could be upgraded to be suitable for human consumption if
there was any demand for it. It is simply a matter of processing to
remove the foreign matter and removing the kernels that are less dense
or broken.
>
> >> To produce what we need today for our population fraction of
> >> non-farmers takes everything we currently use on farms from diesel
> >> fuel to synthetic fertilizer and all the industry going into farm
> >> machinery as well as support industries like weather forecasting. I
> >> do not suggest this is an inclusive list. None of this is reduced by
> >> contour plowing.
>
> >> What do you envision as sustainable that uses fossil fuels
>
> > You dont have to use fossil fuels.
>
> What is the alternative other than fission and eventually maybe fusion?
Your starting from some basic false assumptions. You think energy needs
to be handed down from above. That there is no way humans can be
anything but master-slave dependency relationship when it comes to
energy. You think it is impossible for a human being to have a home or
life style that is energy self sufficient or even partially
self-sufficient. You assume everyone must be entirely dependent on
getting energy form the master outside their own domain.
The main alternative form of energy in the near future is still going
to be conservation. that is where most of the "new" energy will come
from - That means doing essentially the same things we are now just a
lot more efficiently.
>
> >> and irreplaceable natural resources?
>
> > None of those get used. They just get moved around.
>
> Yes, of course. It can't be expressed simply. In fact some 90% of our metal
> (meaning by volume not by metal, meaning iron and aluminum overwhelm the
> estimate, meaning one aluminum engine block is many thousand of cans) usage is
> recycled and we add only roughly 10% per year. But there is always the
> inevitable fraction that does not reach the recycling and recycling is not
> 100% efficient. I know of no study separating increasing demand and inevitable
> losses from the system. Got anything better? Let me know.
Well here is one. How about a cost accounting that takes into account
that depletion of resources? If the cost of new aluminum takes depletion
into account it would make the existing aluminum in circulation a lot
more valuable and then less of it would get wasted. BTW your figure are
way too optimistic the portion of aluminum or iron products that are
made from recycled material is less than 50%. It could be significantly
higher but there is little economic incentive to make it so.
But it isn't just the acquisition and use of resources that has become
profoundly inefficient, in fact the whole economy is designed to reward
waste. It is more economical to buy widgets at Walmart that were made
half way around the world than it would be to buy the same product that
was manufactured in a shop a half a block from each store. What is the
empirical economic reason why it should work best that way? There isn't
any good economic reason, but there are a vast number of social and
political reasons why the economics gravitate to such a profound level
of inefficiency.
>
> Consider the beer/soda can. Making it of steel takes a specialized factory
> near the end user as shipping finished cans means shipping a lot of air.
Geez... so what would be wrong with lots of specialized factories near
the end user? You say that as if it is a given that would be bad thing.
I mean a machine that stamp out cans could be set up in your garage.
But just maybe the whole business of packaging should be considered in
light of legitimate economic considerations rather than the phony
economics that drive it now. Packaging is another segment of the economy
that is just a vast mountain of waste just waiting to cave in like a
house of cards when energy costs spike upwards.
> Producing aluminum cans is very much simpler and a decent size
> brewery/whatever-soda-companies-are-called can build a production facility on
> their property.
Why do you think it is simpler or even much different than steel? I'm
not advocating steel just your analysis of sustainability always seems
to entirely consist of comparing it to all the other unsustainable
things that could be done instead.
>
> Given the state of hygiene not to mention all the costs of the old reusable
> glass bottles I can make people sick of that idea of going back to them. I was
> just a kid. All the cockroaches in them stacked out back of the store was fun.
> I never even knew the cockroaches went inside the grocery. Bottle deposits
> were to cover costs for breakage not to keep trash off the streets.
It is not as if packaging was designed to be any more energy efficient
50 years ago either. Your whole premise is we must either do what we are
doing now or go back and do what we used to be doing (which in most
cases was even more foolish that what we do now) - according to you
there is nothing else. What you present are not choices they are only
designed solely to make it appear that choosing is not very appealing.
Besides the underlying problem in all your rambling is the same - most
of these enterprises of which you speak are going to be major problems
whenever energy costs spikes upward. This is because they really aren't
at all sustainable for even a little while without cheap energy. You
refuse to look at anything that might work in an environment of costly
energy because your only real agenda is that we must have easy cheap
energy. That is your whole focus. It is not how can we do things that
will be sustainable but how can we crawl back into that comfortable
cocoon of cheap easy energy. So you construct all these scenarios
around easy cheap energy, refusing to even contemplate anything else
might even exist.
>
> A steel airplane cannot get off the ground, almost literally. Aluminum in
> cars is to reduce the energy requirement to move them.
Airplanes may have a tough time getting off the ground under any
circumstance without the current moderate government support being
replaced with massive government support.
-jim
Rod Speed
Cheap energy in the sense of the price of electricity wont be spiking, you watch.
> You refuse to look at anything that might work in an environment of costly energy
You keep mindlessly claiming that we will see 'costly' energy when we wont.
At most we MIGHT see a significant increase in TRANSPORT FUEL energy prices.
> because your only real agenda is that we must have easy cheap energy.
Its a fact we will continue to have that, even if that does see
us move to the use of nukes in surface ships to power them.
> That is your whole focus. It is not how can we do things
> that will be sustainable but how can we crawl back
> into that comfortable cocoon of cheap easy energy.
No reason not to use cheap energy when it continues
to be available, as it will forever with electricity.
> So you construct all these scenarios around easy cheap energy,
> refusing to even contemplate anything else might even exist.
You're lying now. He's just got enough of a clue
to realise that cheap electricity is here to stay.
>> A steel airplane cannot get off the ground, almost literally. Aluminum
>> in cars is to reduce the energy requirement to move them.
> Airplanes may have a tough time getting off the ground under
> any circumstance without the current moderate government
> support being replaced with massive government support.
Pure fantasy.
Matt Giwer
...
> Its a fact we will continue to have that, even if that does see
> us move to the use of nukes in surface ships to power them.
A modest quibble here. The problem is while nuke power plants are cheaper in
the long run so far the knowledge required to operate them is much greater
than for conventional ships and the penalties for error are much greater.
Qualified manpower is potentially the greatest obstacle to commercial power
plants. But if the French can do it who can't?
...
> You're lying now. He's just got enough of a clue
> to realise that cheap electricity is here to stay.
Just enough of?
http://www.giwersworld.org/environment/aehb.phtml
Been there and done that 20 years ago almost.
--
The oldest terrorist organization in the United States
is the Jewish Defense League.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 4167
http://www.haaretz.com What is Israel really like? http://www.jpost.com a7
Mon Jul 27 01:48:02 EDT 2009
Matt Giwer
> Matt Giwer wrote:
>>>> Food for a particular size population will take a certain amount of acreage.
>>> Not necessarily.
>> What might be the difference as you see it?
>> If you mean going veggie that really does not work either. Grain is graded by
>> quality. People would not like eating the grain we feed to cattle.
> That is false. If everyone in the US decided to stop eating meat, there
> is no reason to believe there would need to be any degradation of the
> quality of grain people eat - You just made that up out of thin air. I'm
> not advocating veggie, just pointing out your arguments are based on
> stuff you make up to support what you like.
First you say I made it up and then you go on to give one example of why I am
correct.
> For instance Americans consume only about 10% of the corn grown in the
> US. The difference in the corn that goes to human consumption is mostly
> just processing. The grade of corn for human consumption has much less
> broken and immature kernels and much less foreign matter like weed seeds
> and dirt. But the vast majority of the corn that isn't used for human
> consumption could be upgraded to be suitable for human consumption if
> there was any demand for it. It is simply a matter of processing to
> remove the foreign matter and removing the kernels that are less dense
> or broken.
This is only one reason. But you show the lower quality of what is fed to
animals. To get rid of what is not wanted in human food cost money which
raises the price.
Then there is the assumption that grain is independent of soil and weather
conditions as well as tilling and harvesting variations which is not true.
If grain is grown only for people then to get sufficient quality product
there will be wasted crops. Second rate land will lie fallow because there is
not reason to waste time growing low quality grain that can't be sold. But as
meat animals have no choice but to eat whatever the quality as they do in the
wild meat is available as a by-product of good agricultural management which
optimizes earnings.
We rarely see this as we do not buy wheat by the bushel but we do buy produce
like carrots and lettuce and we see the variations in quality I talk about
even though a particular selection of one item in the store likely comes from
exactly the same field of the same farm. Yet we choose by quality. Wheat, corn
and other grains have the same variations.
Way back when the family visited the farm of a war buddy. One of his favorite
stories the great idea of filter cigarettes. Before filters he could not sell
all of his crop for quality concerns. After filters he could sell everything
every year. Yet the plants came from the same seed every year.
>>>> To produce what we need today for our population fraction of
>>>> non-farmers takes everything we currently use on farms from diesel
>>>> fuel to synthetic fertilizer and all the industry going into farm
>>>> machinery as well as support industries like weather forecasting. I
>>>> do not suggest this is an inclusive list. None of this is reduced by
>>>> contour plowing.
>>>> What do you envision as sustainable that uses fossil fuels
>>> You dont have to use fossil fuels.
>> What is the alternative other than fission and eventually maybe fusion?
> Your starting from some basic false assumptions. You think energy needs
> to be handed down from above. That there is no way humans can be
> anything but master-slave dependency relationship when it comes to
> energy. You think it is impossible for a human being to have a home or
> life style that is energy self sufficient or even partially
> self-sufficient. You assume everyone must be entirely dependent on
> getting energy form the master outside their own domain.
I agree individuals can have a life style where they are energy independent.
I do not agree that is possible while maintaining our same lifestyle with
things such as air conditioning.
> The main alternative form of energy in the near future is still going
> to be conservation. that is where most of the "new" energy will come
> from - That means doing essentially the same things we are now just a
> lot more efficiently.
If you choose to live without A/C that is your choice. As to heating I find
it difficult to conceive of any way to be self sufficient in energy and stay
warm in the winter. Of course if you choose to live in the wilderness it can
be done. But even on 1/4 acre suburb lots it can't be done short of a yard
with only solar cells (no sunlight wasted reaching the ground) and a huge
battery bank some place. Efficiency figures for each step are freely available
as are calculators. Solar energy simply is not enough in winter.
On smaller lots it does not work. It cannot work for apartments or in cities
nor for factories. And this is before considering the acquisition and
ownership costs or their useful life.
I have done the math although the Visicalc spreadsheet is long gone. The
biggest complaint from the green crowd was that I was being in some manner
"unfair" by including everything. In any event solar is only good news for A/C.
>>>> and irreplaceable natural resources?
>>> None of those get used. They just get moved around.
>> Yes, of course. It can't be expressed simply. In fact some 90% of our metal
>> (meaning by volume not by metal, meaning iron and aluminum overwhelm the
>> estimate, meaning one aluminum engine block is many thousand of cans) usage is
>> recycled and we add only roughly 10% per year. But there is always the
>> inevitable fraction that does not reach the recycling and recycling is not
>> 100% efficient. I know of no study separating increasing demand and inevitable
>> losses from the system. Got anything better? Let me know.
> Well here is one. How about a cost accounting that takes into account
> that depletion of resources?
Because depletion is not a cost. An arbitrary penalty is not accounting; it
is politics. Depletion means only using lower grade ore for example. That is
already in the accounting and it only increases production costs. The last oil
spike was long enough that plans to uncap lower production wells were started
but the price dropped before money was wasted doing that.
> If the cost of new aluminum takes depletion
> into account it would make the existing aluminum in circulation a lot
> more valuable and then less of it would get wasted. BTW your figure are
> way too optimistic the portion of aluminum or iron products that are
> made from recycled material is less than 50%. It could be significantly
> higher but there is little economic incentive to make it so.
A free market does not work that way. Regardless of any accounting gimmick
the price it the price. It is NEVER a matter of what to sell it for (and we
call that price fixing) but what people are willing to pay.
As to the percentage, 10% is compound as in interest. That is doubling the
amount in use every six years or so. But as to the recycling fraction I have
read and viewed documentaries using that figure. A round 10 is always suspect.
But take the major source of recycled aluminum and steel, cars. I am certain
there are cars rusting away on some farms but effectively 100% of them are
recycled. Not to be macabre but the steel in the World Trade Center buildings
were recycled. As a source of recycled steel the winning bidder shipped it to
China for recycling. So is the steel in all demolished buildings. When train
rails are replaced the old ones are recycled as are all train engines and
cars. Even DOD recycles it tanks and ships. Everything too large to disposed
of in home trashcans is recycled.
This is why I am profoundly unimpressed by the pleas to recycle soda cans.
Not that I dismissed it without trying. A large trash bag full of cans was
worth less than $2. At least $0.40 went to gas to get there and back. The bag
stank from the decay of the remaining liquid such that throwing it away was a
good idea at $0.32 each. The economics are very questionable if the total cost
per mile and not just gasoline are included.
> But it isn't just the acquisition and use of resources that has become
> profoundly inefficient, in fact the whole economy is designed to reward
> waste.
I am familiar with the subject. That is a mantra not a fact.
> It is more economical to buy widgets at Walmart that were made
> half way around the world than it would be to buy the same product that
> was manufactured in a shop a half a block from each store. What is the
> empirical economic reason why it should work best that way? There isn't
> any good economic reason, but there are a vast number of social and
> political reasons why the economics gravitate to such a profound level
> of inefficiency.
I guess you missed out of the fact that labor is the greatest component of
total cost of almost everything. It is cheaper from around the world because
labor is cheap. It was not always this way. Labor costs have increased. The
cost of materials has fallen though the floor.
The fact that inflation adjusted costs of materials has been decreasing since
the beginning of industrialization is not in question. So has the cost of
distribution. Manpower has become the greatest cost.
If you like inside secrets here is a true fact. Regardless of the huge cost
of weapons systems the manpower costs of DOD is a bit over 40%. Manpower
includes not just active duty pay but all costs which accrue to people like
retirement and CHAMPUS which is retiree health care. For another fact back 20
years ago $6000 of every car out of Detroit went to the non-labor direct labor
such as health insurance and retirement costs.
It has nothing to do with efficiency because efficiency offers trivial
savings for the smallest fraction of the cost of production. Efficiency is a
standard factory process. But we cannot see a 1/2% reduction in 15% of the
cost reflected in a price which is rounded to a few cents under the next
highest dollar. If a profitable price is $8.23 the price will be $8.96 or some
such. People won't buy otherwise. This has been tested. People will buy for an
$8.23 item when a $8.96 item is available even when displayed side by side.
>> Consider the beer/soda can. Making it of steel takes a specialized factory
>> near the end user as shipping finished cans means shipping a lot of air.
>
> Geez... so what would be wrong with lots of specialized factories near
> the end user?
There is nothing "wrong" with it. It is that the cost of local production of
steel cans costs to much to be competitive. It was done that way at one time.
Production costs and selling price is lower the way it is now.
> You say that as if it is a given that would be bad thing.
> I mean a machine that stamp out cans could be set up in your garage.
You must have some garage to stamp out 100,000+ cans a day. That is only ~
4000 cases a day, a very small brewery. 100,000 cans would be only 33,000
drinkers at 3 a day each.
> But just maybe the whole business of packaging should be considered in
> light of legitimate economic considerations rather than the phony
> economics that drive it now. Packaging is another segment of the economy
> that is just a vast mountain of waste just waiting to cave in like a
> house of cards when energy costs spike upwards.
Economic considerations are making a profit and nothing more. Some people
don't like profits. That is not very bright. Remember the Cold War. They lost.
Packaging is such an ignorant bugaboo I really don't know where to start. How
about with reusable grocery bags? They need be run through the washer and
dryer after every use if it is of interest to meet the same sanitation level
as is required for the supermarket. What is the energy cost of cleaning them
as compared to disposable plastic? I do not know but given the weight of the
plastic bags one trip through an electric dryer is equal to hundreds if not
thousands of them. Burn one of the plastic bags and estimate how much water
could be evaporated with that little heat. Then consider the oil at the power
plant to the dryer starts with at least a 65% loss just in making the
electricity before considering transmission losses and the efficiency of the
dryer itself.
>> Producing aluminum cans is very much simpler and a decent size
>> brewery/whatever-soda-companies-are-called can build a production facility on
>> their property.
> Why do you think it is simpler or even much different than steel?
Because I have read the outline of why it is and ran a sanity check on it.
But that matters not. The brewer knows the cost of both. Aluminum is cheaper.
The brewer would never have switched if it were not. Again, this is a change
based upon costs not what is in fashion.
> I'm
> not advocating steel just your analysis of sustainability always seems
> to entirely consist of comparing it to all the other unsustainable
> things that could be done instead.
What would you consider sustainable in the case of packaging beer in
convenient sizes vice quarter, half and full barrels?
>> Given the state of hygiene not to mention all the costs of the old reusable
>> glass bottles I can make people sick of that idea of going back to them. I was
>> just a kid. All the cockroaches in them stacked out back of the store was fun.
>> I never even knew the cockroaches went inside the grocery. Bottle deposits
>> were to cover costs for breakage not to keep trash off the streets.
> It is not as if packaging was designed to be any more energy efficient
> 50 years ago either. Your whole premise is we must either do what we are
> doing now or go back and do what we used to be doing (which in most
> cases was even more foolish that what we do now) - according to you
> there is nothing else. What you present are not choices they are only
> designed solely to make it appear that choosing is not very appealing.
The total cost of glass is greater than steel which is greater than aluminum.
This is not speculation. This is real world experience.
As above manpower costs are the greatest factor. In the good old days filled
glass bottles were dropped off and empty ones loaded and they were NEVER
stacked for easy loading but lets say they were. The reloading took as much
time as unloading. The labor cost of delivering disposable cans is roughly
half that of glass.
I am not trying to make anything appear like anything. I have simply
described the reasons why today things are done differently than in the past.
I am not arguing anything, just informing.
> Besides the underlying problem in all your rambling is the same - most
> of these enterprises of which you speak are going to be major problems
> whenever energy costs spikes upward.
By definition spikes are short term events. During the last spike most
companies were capitalized well enough they were able to avoid raising prices
to cover energy costs. It was a minor problem.
> This is because they really aren't
> at all sustainable for even a little while without cheap energy. You
> refuse to look at anything that might work in an environment of costly
> energy because your only real agenda is that we must have easy cheap
> energy. That is your whole focus. It is not how can we do things that
> will be sustainable but how can we crawl back into that comfortable
> cocoon of cheap easy energy. So you construct all these scenarios
> around easy cheap energy, refusing to even contemplate anything else
> might even exist.
I have no agenda in this matter. I do not own any stock, period. My income is
federal government with no relation to any energy related issue in any manner.
I have no connection in any manner with any aspect of any industry beyond a
normal consumer/customer. There are no legalisms or weasel words or hidden
meanings in those statements.
That said, spikes are short term and can be weathered. Long term increases
have never occurred. The cost of all things, inflation adjusted, has always
decreased save for arbitrary government intrusion such as with marijuana.
Middle term increases usually go up but in the long term always go down.
Despite the spike in oil prices, in the US gasoline was only higher than the
price in the 1950s for about two months with adjustment for inflation. At the
present price for oil it is cheaper than it was in the 1950s. Inflation is a
nasty thing. It is also official government policy to create inflation rather
than aim for zero inflation and suffer periods of deflation. And fools wonder
why people do not put money in the banks in savings accounts.
The prices of things continues to decrease even though over the last century
or so we have had to move to lower quality sources for raw materials. A good
example is iron ore of which there are two basic kinds and whose names I do
not recall. The richest form found in the US was depleted by WWI, I not II.
Since then our local sources have been the lower yield kind which does come in
richness levels, ounces per ton. Even as producers move to lower grades of ore
the long term price of iron continues to fall.
>> A steel airplane cannot get off the ground, almost literally. Aluminum in
>> cars is to reduce the energy requirement to move them.
> Airplanes may have a tough time getting off the ground under any
> circumstance without the current moderate government support being
> replaced with massive government support.
Again, I am talking engineering and you are talking politics.
The main problem with airlines and in fact most business in the country and
in the developed world in general is the thousands of shelf feet of tax law
modeled on the fractal. All tax laws considered it is more profitable after
taxes to do things which would be criminally stupid and firing offenses
without the tax laws.
A true fact is that home ownership does not makes sense for most people
without the tax laws skewing the market. The laws skew the housing market so
badly that they are the major contributor to housing booms and busts. The
major thing is interest is deductible from income and payments are mostly
interest in the beginning. That makes it much easier to own. But in
maintenance and repair and upkeep the people who own only their own homes pay
full market price for everything. And that means usually twice the price. And
then try to move for job reasons when the market does not support quick turn
overs. People look to good and bad times and rarely pay enough attention to
learn the bad times more than negate the good.
The only good news in this is the laws apply to everyone. And the rich have
loopholes to protect themselves. Us peons can use the same loopholes if we can
find them.
Sorry for the rambling but the problems of the airlines came about because of
the tax laws. And for all the crocodile tears in interviews things are
happening exactly to make a profit by means of the tax laws.
--
Jews make no bones about their desire for all Arabs to die.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 4159
http://www.haaretz.com What is Israel really like? http://www.jpost.com a7
Sun Jul 26 23:06:14 EDT 2009
Rod Speed
> Rod Speed wrote:
>> You keep mindlessly claiming that we will see 'costly' energy when we wont.
>> At most we MIGHT see a significant increase in TRANSPORT FUEL energy prices.
>>> because your only real agenda is that we must have easy cheap energy.
>> Its a fact we will continue to have that, even if that does see
>> us move to the use of nukes in surface ships to power them.
> A modest quibble here. The problem is while nuke power plants are cheaper in the long run so far the knowledge
> required to operate them is much greater than for conventional ships
Still perfectly possible to build them so that isnt true.
> and the penalties for error are much greater.
Not if they are designed properly.
> Qualified manpower is potentially the greatest obstacle to commercial power plants. But if the French can do it who
> can't?
Indeed.
>> You're lying now. He's just got enough of a clue
>> to realise that cheap electricity is here to stay.
> Just enough of?
Nope.
> http://www.giwersworld.org/environment/aehb.phtml
> Been there and done that 20 years ago almost.
A mere child |-)
Rod Speed
> jim wrote
>> Matt Giwer wrote
>>>>> Food for a particular size population will take a certain amount of acreage.
>>>> Not necessarily.
>>> What might be the difference as you see it?
>>> If you mean going veggie that really does not work either.
>>> Grain is graded by quality. People would not like eating the grain we feed to cattle.
>> That is false. If everyone in the US decided to stop eating meat,
>> there is no reason to believe there would need to be any degradation
>> of the quality of grain people eat - You just made that up out of
>> thin air. I'm not advocating veggie, just pointing out your
>> arguments are based on stuff you make up to support what you like.
> First you say I made it up and then you go on to give one example of
> why I am correct.
Not really. People do in fact today eat quite a bit of grain
that was once considered only suitable for animals.
>> For instance Americans consume only about 10% of the corn grown in
>> the US. The difference in the corn that goes to human consumption is
>> mostly just processing. The grade of corn for human consumption has
>> much less broken and immature kernels and much less foreign matter
>> like weed seeds and dirt. But the vast majority of the corn that
>> isn't used for human consumption could be upgraded to be suitable
>> for human consumption if there was any demand for it. It is simply a
>> matter of processing to remove the foreign matter and removing the
>> kernels that are less dense or broken.
> This is only one reason. But you show the lower quality of what is
> fed to animals. To get rid of what is not wanted in human food cost
> money which raises the price.
Not by much. We dont bother to do it when its fine for animals.
> Then there is the assumption that grain is independent of soil and
> weather conditions as well as tilling and harvesting variations which
> is not true.
He didnt assume that.
> If grain is grown only for people then to get sufficient quality product there will be wasted crops.
Thats not correct. Some grain will always be used for animals and other non human food uses.
> Second rate land will lie fallow because there is not reason to waste time growing low quality grain that can't be
> sold.
The main reason for downgrading grain for non human use is
actually due to rain at harvest time, not the land its grown on.
> But as meat animals have no choice but to eat whatever the quality as they do in the wild meat is available as a
> by-product
> of good agricultural management which optimizes earnings.
> We rarely see this as we do not buy wheat by the bushel but we do buy
> produce like carrots and lettuce and we see the variations in quality
> I talk about even though a particular selection of one item in the store likely comes from exactly the same field of
> the same farm. Yet we choose by quality. Wheat, corn and other grains have the same variations.
Yes, but you get the same effect with vegys too, the stuff thats not
suitable for humans does get fed to animals quite a bit of the time.
> Way back when the family visited the farm of a war buddy. One of his favorite stories the great idea of filter
> cigarettes. Before filters he could not sell all of his crop for quality concerns. After filters he could sell
> everything every year. Yet the plants came from the same seed every year.
Its more complicated than that with grain crops.
It isnt that hard. A perfectly insulated room doesnt require any extra heating.
Essentially the humans in it provide enough heat to make up for what is lost.
And its perfectly possible to provide more heat than that with solar as well.
> Of course if you choose to live in the wilderness it can be done. But even on 1/4 acre suburb lots it can't be done
> short of a yard with only solar cells (no sunlight wasted reaching the ground) and a huge battery bank some place.
You dont have to go that far. Just close
to perfect insulation and cook with wood etc.
> Efficiency figures for each step are freely available as are calculators. Solar energy simply is not enough in winter.
Fraid it is with good enough insulation.
> On smaller lots it does not work.
Yes it does.
> It cannot work for apartments
Yes it can.
> or in cities
Yes it can.
> nor for factories.
Depends on the factory.
> And this is before considering the acquisition and ownership costs or their useful life.
Close to perfect insulation isnt that expensive anymore.
> I have done the math although the Visicalc spreadsheet is long gone.
You didnt do it well enough.
> The biggest complaint from the green crowd was that I was being in some manner "unfair" by including everything. In
> any event solar is only good news for A/C.
Its fine for heating too.
No they dont when the consumer keeps his own bags.
> What is the energy cost of cleaning them as compared to disposable plastic?
Zero or close enough to that.
> I do not know but given the weight of the plastic bags one trip through an
> electric dryer is equal to hundreds if not thousands of them. Burn
> one of the plastic bags and estimate how much water could be
> evaporated with that little heat. Then consider the oil at the power
> plant to the dryer starts with at least a 65% loss just in making the
> electricity before considering transmission losses and the efficiency
> of the dryer itself.
No need to bother with any of that when the consumer keeps their own bags.
>>> Producing aluminum cans is very much simpler and a decent size
>>> brewery/whatever-soda-companies-are-called can build a production
>>> facility on their property.
>> Why do you think it is simpler or even much different than steel?
> Because I have read the outline of why it is and ran a sanity check on it.
> But that matters not. The brewer knows the cost of both. Aluminum is cheaper.
No it isnt. Plenty still use steel cans.
> The brewer would never have switched if it were not. Again,
> this is a change based upon costs not what is in fashion.
>> I'm not advocating steel just your analysis of sustainability always seems to entirely consist of comparing it to all
>> the other unsustainable things that could be done instead.
> What would you consider sustainable in the case of packaging beer in convenient sizes vice quarter, half and full
> barrels?
Give up on barrels and use refillable glass.
>>> Given the state of hygiene not to mention all the costs of
>>> the old reusable glass bottles I can make people sick of that idea
>>> of going back to them. I was just a kid. All the cockroaches in them stacked out back of the
>>> store was fun. I never even knew the cockroaches went inside the grocery. Bottle
>>> deposits were to cover costs for breakage not to keep trash off the streets.
>> It is not as if packaging was designed to be any more energy
>> efficient 50 years ago either. Your whole premise is we must either
>> do what we are doing now or go back and do what we used to be doing
>> (which in most cases was even more foolish that what we do now) -
>> according to you there is nothing else. What you present are not
>> choices they are only designed solely to make it appear that
>> choosing is not very appealing.
> The total cost of glass is greater than steel which is greater than aluminum.
That last is just plain wrong.
> This is not speculation. This is real world experience.
No it isnt when steel cans are still used.
> As above manpower costs are the greatest factor. In the good old days
> filled glass bottles were dropped off and empty ones loaded and they
> were NEVER stacked for easy loading but lets say they were. The
> reloading took as much time as unloading. The labor cost of
> delivering disposable cans is roughly half that of glass.
Glass is still used.
Not always, oil hasnt.
> Despite the spike in oil prices, in the US gasoline was only higher
> than the price in the 1950s for about two months with adjustment for
> inflation. At the present price for oil it is cheaper than it was in
> the 1950s. Inflation is a nasty thing.
> It is also official government policy to create inflation rather than aim for zero inflation and suffer periods of
> deflation.
That is just plain wrong.
> And fools wonder why people do not put
> money in the banks in savings accounts.
> The prices of things continues to decrease even though over the last
> century or so we have had to move to lower quality sources for raw
> materials. A good example is iron ore of which there are two basic
> kinds and whose names I do not recall. The richest form found in the
> US was depleted by WWI, I not II. Since then our local sources have
> been the lower yield kind which does come in richness levels, ounces
> per ton. Even as producers move to lower grades of ore the long term
> price of iron continues to fall.
And the price of gold doesnt.
>>> A steel airplane cannot get off the ground, almost
>>> literally. Aluminum in cars is to reduce the energy requirement to
>>> move them.
>
>> Airplanes may have a tough time getting off the ground under any
>> circumstance without the current moderate government support being
>> replaced with massive government support.
> Again, I am talking engineering and you are talking politics.
No he isnt.
> The main problem with airlines and in fact most business in the country and in the developed world in general is the
> thousands of shelf feet of tax law modeled on the fractal.
Nope, the main problem is that its a difficult industry to make money in.
> All tax laws considered it is more profitable after taxes to do things which would be criminally stupid and firing
> offenses without the tax laws.
That isnt the problem with airlines.
> A true fact is that home ownership does not makes sense for most people without the tax laws skewing the market.
That is just plain wrong.
> The laws skew the housing market so badly that they are the major contributor to housing booms and busts.
It isnt the laws that produce that result, its interest rates that
are the main tool used to modulate the state of the economy.
> The major thing is interest is deductible from income and payments are mostly interest in the beginning.
You still get those booms and busts in countrys
that dont allow any deduction of interest.
> That makes it much easier to own.
The real thing that makes it much easier to own is the very low interest rates.
> But in maintenance and repair and upkeep the people who own only their own homes pay full market price for everything.
Like hell they do.
And renters pay those costs anyway.
> And that means usually twice the price.
Oh bullshit.
> And then try to move for job reasons when the market does not support quick turn overs.
Doesnt happen for most.
> People look to good and bad times and rarely pay enough
> attention to learn the bad times more than negate the good.
And on average home owners do a lot better financially than renters.
And its an excellent form of forced saving too.
> The only good news in this is the laws apply to everyone. And the rich have loopholes to protect themselves. Us peons
> can use the same loopholes if we can find them.
> Sorry for the rambling but the problems of the airlines came about because of the tax laws.
No they didnt.
> And for all the crocodile tears in interviews things are happening exactly to make a profit by means of the tax laws.
Wrong again.
jim
Matt Giwer wrote:
>
> jim wrote:
> > Matt Giwer wrote:
> >>>> Food for a particular size population will take a certain amount of acreage.
> >>> Not necessarily.
> >> What might be the difference as you see it?
> >> If you mean going veggie that really does not work either. Grain is graded by
> >> quality. People would not like eating the grain we feed to cattle.
>
> > That is false. If everyone in the US decided to stop eating meat, there
> > is no reason to believe there would need to be any degradation of the
> > quality of grain people eat - You just made that up out of thin air. I'm
> > not advocating veggie, just pointing out your arguments are based on
> > stuff you make up to support what you like.
>
> First you say I made it up and then you go on to give one example of why I am
> correct.
You said "People would not like eating the grain we feed to cattle".
That is what I said was not true. People are already eating the same
grain that cattle eat. If the amount of grain people decided to eat
doubled it wouldn't change anything about the quality of grain people
eat or how they like it.
>
> > For instance Americans consume only about 10% of the corn grown in the
> > US. The difference in the corn that goes to human consumption is mostly
> > just processing. The grade of corn for human consumption has much less
> > broken and immature kernels and much less foreign matter like weed seeds
> > and dirt. But the vast majority of the corn that isn't used for human
> > consumption could be upgraded to be suitable for human consumption if
> > there was any demand for it. It is simply a matter of processing to
> > remove the foreign matter and removing the kernels that are less dense
> > or broken.
>
> This is only one reason. But you show the lower quality of what is fed to
> animals. To get rid of what is not wanted in human food cost money which
> raises the price.
We are already doing that. The corn fed to humans is already slightly
higher priced. You claim something new would be happening - not true.
>
> Then there is the assumption that grain is independent of soil and weather
> conditions as well as tilling and harvesting variations which is not true.
Not sure what that means, but it doesn't sound relevant.
>
> If grain is grown only for people then to get sufficient quality product
> there will be wasted crops.
First of all the waste we are talking about is relatively small.
Handling and processing costs for grain that goes to humans is slightly
higher. Same is true for potatoes or beets.
Grain is grown for lots of things. It is used for non-food industrial
purposes also.
> Second rate land will lie fallow because there is
> not reason to waste time growing low quality grain that can't be sold.
Or maybe some other crop will be grown for energy or food or fiber or
something else. Is your point that the dynamics of farming would change
completely if people stopped eating meat? That is pretty obvious it
would. Obviously some farmers would go out of business because not
eating meat (particularly if adopted globally) would mean a huge
reduction in demand for farm products. But that was the very reason the
subject entered the discussion in the first place, No?
>But as
> meat animals have no choice but to eat whatever the quality as they do in the
> wild meat is available as a by-product of good agricultural management which
> optimizes earnings.
First of all most of the meat is grown by ranchers (who grow meat) and
grain is grown by farmers who grow grain. But if you are arguing that
raising meat is necessary to be a farmer. I don't see where you came up
with that. It is certainly part of the demand for farm products. If that
demand goes away then one immediate consequence would be some surplus
grain that nobody wants.
>
> We rarely see this as we do not buy wheat by the bushel but we do buy produce
> like carrots and lettuce and we see the variations in quality I talk about
> even though a particular selection of one item in the store likely comes from
> exactly the same field of the same farm. Yet we choose by quality. Wheat, corn
> and other grains have the same variations.
I don't think you can learn much about grain by looking at lettuce and
carrots. Are your vegetarians not going to be consuming things like
milk and eggs or high fructose corn syrup or grain alcohol? There would
still be markets for low quality grain even if more high quality is
needed.
>
> Way back when the family visited the farm of a war buddy. One of his favorite
> stories the great idea of filter cigarettes. Before filters he could not sell
> all of his crop for quality concerns. After filters he could sell everything
> every year. Yet the plants came from the same seed every year.
A) You are talking a long time ago and agriculture has changed a lot
since.
B) you didn't explain if the farmer was growing tobacco or some fiber
used for making cigarette filters but it sounds like you are drawing way
to many erroneous conclusions from that one anecdote.
>
> >>>> To produce what we need today for our population fraction of
> >>>> non-farmers takes everything we currently use on farms from diesel
> >>>> fuel to synthetic fertilizer and all the industry going into farm
> >>>> machinery as well as support industries like weather forecasting. I
> >>>> do not suggest this is an inclusive list. None of this is reduced by
> >>>> contour plowing.
> >>>> What do you envision as sustainable that uses fossil fuels
> >>> You dont have to use fossil fuels.
> >> What is the alternative other than fission and eventually maybe fusion?
>
> > Your starting from some basic false assumptions. You think energy needs
> > to be handed down from above. That there is no way humans can be
> > anything but master-slave dependency relationship when it comes to
> > energy. You think it is impossible for a human being to have a home or
> > life style that is energy self sufficient or even partially
> > self-sufficient. You assume everyone must be entirely dependent on
> > getting energy form the master outside their own domain.
>
> I agree individuals can have a life style where they are energy independent.
> I do not agree that is possible while maintaining our same lifestyle with
> things such as air conditioning.
Yes but you are trying to analyze how a frog swims without putting the
frog in water. That kind of analysis leads to erroneous conclusions.
>
> > The main alternative form of energy in the near future is still going
> > to be conservation. that is where most of the "new" energy will come
> > from - That means doing essentially the same things we are now just a
> > lot more efficiently.
>
> If you choose to live without A/C that is your choice. As to heating I find
> it difficult to conceive of any way to be self sufficient in energy and stay
> warm in the winter.
So now your frog analysis has concluded there are absolutely no
efficiency increases possible with heating and cooling systems?
>Of course if you choose to live in the wilderness it can
> be done. But even on 1/4 acre suburb lots it can't be done short of a yard
> with only solar cells (no sunlight wasted reaching the ground) and a huge
> battery bank some place. Efficiency figures for each step are freely available
> as are calculators. Solar energy simply is not enough in winter.
>
> On smaller lots it does not work. It cannot work for apartments or in cities
> nor for factories. And this is before considering the acquisition and
> ownership costs or their useful life.
>
> I have done the math although the Visicalc spreadsheet is long gone. The
> biggest complaint from the green crowd was that I was being in some manner
> "unfair" by including everything. In any event solar is only good news for A/C.
So now your frog analysis has solved the AC problem?
>
> >>>> and irreplaceable natural resources?
> >>> None of those get used. They just get moved around.
> >> Yes, of course. It can't be expressed simply. In fact some 90% of our metal
> >> (meaning by volume not by metal, meaning iron and aluminum overwhelm the
> >> estimate, meaning one aluminum engine block is many thousand of cans) usage is
> >> recycled and we add only roughly 10% per year. But there is always the
> >> inevitable fraction that does not reach the recycling and recycling is not
> >> 100% efficient. I know of no study separating increasing demand and inevitable
> >> losses from the system. Got anything better? Let me know.
>
> > Well here is one. How about a cost accounting that takes into account
> > that depletion of resources?
>
> Because depletion is not a cost. An arbitrary penalty is not accounting;
Please justify your use of the word "arbitrary". Is not every other tax
an arbitrary penalty?
Is depletion allowance that has been given as a tax benefit to oil
producers arbitrary? Is tax on income arbitrary? Does society have an
some vested interest in discouraging people from working by imposing an
arbitrary tax on incomes of people who do productive work?
Please explain which current tax is not "arbitrary"?
> it
> is politics. Depletion means only using lower grade ore for example. That is
> already in the accounting and it only increases production costs. The last oil
> spike was long enough that plans to uncap lower production wells were started
> but the price dropped before money was wasted doing that.
And the important theme in every thing you say is "we must preserve and
protect our addiction to cheap oil... That is always paramount right?
>
> > If the cost of new aluminum takes depletion
> > into account it would make the existing aluminum in circulation a lot
> > more valuable and then less of it would get wasted. BTW your figure are
> > way too optimistic the portion of aluminum or iron products that are
> > made from recycled material is less than 50%. It could be significantly
> > higher but there is little economic incentive to make it so.
>
> A free market does not work that way. Regardless of any accounting gimmick
> the price it the price. It is NEVER a matter of what to sell it for (and we
> call that price fixing) but what people are willing to pay.
So how does that fit in to the discussion? Are you saying if oil was
taxed at $200/barrel people would refuse to buy?
Seems to me that if the tax system was structured like that we would
have lot more efficient use of energy. Those who want to be inefficient
would see more of their income go to energy and those who want to be
efficient would have more disposable income for other things. Recycled
aluminum would become valuable because it uses less energy. And
recycling would also become much more energy efficient. If we don't
recycle it is not cheap either. We have to dig holes in the ground that
are constructed to protect the water aquifers and we have to pay people
to collect and place the non recycled stuff in the holes. That process
of disposing is more energy efficient than recycling but not all that
much.
>
> As to the percentage, 10% is compound as in interest. That is doubling the
> amount in use every six years or so.
So that says nothing at all about recycling. The amount in use could be
increasing by 10% even if hardly any was being recycled.
> But as to the recycling fraction I have
> read and viewed documentaries using that figure. A round 10 is always suspect.
> But take the major source of recycled aluminum and steel, cars. I am certain
> there are cars rusting away on some farms but effectively 100% of them are
> recycled. Not to be macabre but the steel in the World Trade Center buildings
> were recycled. As a source of recycled steel the winning bidder shipped it to
> China for recycling. So is the steel in all demolished buildings. When train
> rails are replaced the old ones are recycled as are all train engines and
> cars. Even DOD recycles it tanks and ships. Everything too large to disposed
> of in home trashcans is recycled.
>
> This is why I am profoundly unimpressed by the pleas to recycle soda cans.
> Not that I dismissed it without trying. A large trash bag full of cans was
> worth less than $2. At least $0.40 went to gas to get there and back. The bag
> stank from the decay of the remaining liquid such that throwing it away was a
> good idea at $0.32 each. The economics are very questionable if the total cost
> per mile and not just gasoline are included.
I don't disagree but that is still just a bad frog analysis. If there
was much higher price on petroleum products due to tax then everything
in your analysis would look completely different. There are communities
that have fully embraced recycling and recycle practically everything
and their lives are not the hell you imagine it would be.
>
> > But it isn't just the acquisition and use of resources that has become
> > profoundly inefficient, in fact the whole economy is designed to reward
> > waste.
>
> I am familiar with the subject. That is a mantra not a fact.
Unfortunately the waste is regarded as substance and the loss of much of
the waste is regarded as economic loss. That is because the waste has
become so institutionalized that people won't even bring themselves to
contemplate what are the possibilities of doing things without the
waste.
>
> > It is more economical to buy widgets at Walmart that were made
> > half way around the world than it would be to buy the same product that
> > was manufactured in a shop a half a block from each store. What is the
> > empirical economic reason why it should work best that way? There isn't
> > any good economic reason, but there are a vast number of social and
> > political reasons why the economics gravitate to such a profound level
> > of inefficiency.
>
> I guess you missed out of the fact that labor is the greatest component of
> total cost of almost everything. It is cheaper from around the world because
> labor is cheap. It was not always this way. Labor costs have increased. The
> cost of materials has fallen though the floor.
No I didn't miss the cost of labor. Your frog analysis did. If you
actually put the frog in water and observe how it swims you would have a
much different picture than just imagining how a frog might swim.
If the tax system was designed so that the energy component of products
was taxed instead of the labor component you would have a completely
different economic reality. You might then be able to go to a store and
buy widgets that are made just a short distance from that store. But
that too is just my frog analysis, because everything would be different
- the store, the customers and the widgets would all have evolved
differently in that different economic environment. So it isn't possible
to tell you exactly what any of it would look like because I haven't
seen how the frog swims in that water either.
>
> The fact that inflation adjusted costs of materials has been decreasing since
> the beginning of industrialization is not in question. So has the cost of
> distribution. Manpower has become the greatest cost.
Only because that was, to use your term, "arbitrarily" imposed by the
tax structure.
It may well be possible to argue that this has been a wonderful system,
but there is one little problem. It only works as long as the fuel for
distribution and procurement of materials remains cheap and plentiful.
Whenever the fuel and some of the materials (i.e. petroleum) becomes
costly the whole system collapses like a house of cards.
Over the last 30 years we have developed a system whereby we manage to
ignore this inconvenient reality because we bail ourselves out of the
mess each time it falls over by borrowing from the future.
That borrowing from the future seems to suggest that we believe that
either the future won't have scarce and costly petroleum or that it will
have a perfect substitute for cheap petroleum. Neither of those is very
realistic IMO. So it seems we are living a giant fantasy (i.e. hoping
for a miracle).
The reality is we are headed for a colossal economic train wreck,
because the future won't hold cheap oil and will hold a lot of debt.
>
> If you like inside secrets here is a true fact. Regardless of the huge cost
> of weapons systems the manpower costs of DOD is a bit over 40%. Manpower
> includes not just active duty pay but all costs which accrue to people like
> retirement and CHAMPUS which is retiree health care. For another fact back 20
> years ago $6000 of every car out of Detroit went to the non-labor direct labor
> such as health insurance and retirement costs.
>
> It has nothing to do with efficiency because efficiency offers trivial
> savings for the smallest fraction of the cost of production. Efficiency is a
> standard factory process. But we cannot see a 1/2% reduction in 15% of the
> cost reflected in a price which is rounded to a few cents under the next
> highest dollar. If a profitable price is $8.23 the price will be $8.96 or some
> such. People won't buy otherwise. This has been tested. People will buy for an
> $8.23 item when a $8.96 item is available even when displayed side by side.
Oh gimme a break Detroit should be allowed to go under. They could be
profitable if they had not been delude by their belief that oil would be
forever cheap and plentiful. And your efficiency analysis is just more
frog analysis based on a complete unwillingness to look at how expensive
petroleum could play into any of this.
>
> >> Consider the beer/soda can. Making it of steel takes a specialized factory
> >> near the end user as shipping finished cans means shipping a lot of air.
> >
> > Geez... so what would be wrong with lots of specialized factories near
> > the end user?
>
> There is nothing "wrong" with it. It is that the cost of local production of
> steel cans costs to much to be competitive. It was done that way at one time.
> Production costs and selling price is lower the way it is now.
There are still a few local beverage "bottlers" that put there product
in steel cans. I'm sure that aluminum is cheaper which is why there are
only a few small companies that are still clinging to the old equipment.
I don't see the weight of the can being much of the issue. Steel used to
be a big US industry. Now it isn't. Aluminum is still made in USA. Steel
comes from Asia or Europe. If transportation costs were more of a cost
factor steel would still be a big industry in the US. But obviously
transportation is not very consequential if we can ship are scrap iron
to china and they ship back sheet metal and structural steel.
>
> > You say that as if it is a given that would be bad thing.
> > I mean a machine that stamp out cans could be set up in your garage.
>
> You must have some garage to stamp out 100,000+ cans a day. That is only ~
> 4000 cases a day, a very small brewery. 100,000 cans would be only 33,000
> drinkers at 3 a day each.
The point was the can maker machine is at the bottling plant regardless
of whether it is aluminum or steel.
>
> > But just maybe the whole business of packaging should be considered in
> > light of legitimate economic considerations rather than the phony
> > economics that drive it now. Packaging is another segment of the economy
> > that is just a vast mountain of waste just waiting to cave in like a
> > house of cards when energy costs spike upwards.
>
> Economic considerations are making a profit and nothing more. Some people
> don't like profits. That is not very bright. Remember the Cold War. They lost.
Oh really so how is giving a trillion dollars to bankers fit in with
your philosophy of "Economic considerations are making a profit and
nothing more". That sure looks like something more to me.
And you have expressed an interest in population control. The most
effective population control is to give people old age security. That
way they don't have children just so somebody can take care of them in
their old age. There is no profit motive in providing social security
and pensions, but that doesn't mean society doesn't have a vested
interest in pursuing this endeavor which becomes a huge part of the
economy.
>
> Packaging is such an ignorant bugaboo I really don't know where to start. How
> about with reusable grocery bags? They need be run through the washer and
> dryer after every use if it is of interest to meet the same sanitation level
> as is required for the supermarket. What is the energy cost of cleaning them
> as compared to disposable plastic?
You mean were back to the frog analysis?
>I do not know but given the weight of the
> plastic bags one trip through an electric dryer is equal to hundreds if not
> thousands of them. Burn one of the plastic bags and estimate how much water
> could be evaporated with that little heat. Then consider the oil at the power
> plant to the dryer starts with at least a 65% loss just in making the
> electricity before considering transmission losses and the efficiency of the
> dryer itself.
So how would all that look different if there was a high tax on oil?
>
> >> Producing aluminum cans is very much simpler and a decent size
> >> brewery/whatever-soda-companies-are-called can build a production facility on
> >> their property.
>
> > Why do you think it is simpler or even much different than steel?
>
> Because I have read the outline of why it is and ran a sanity check on it.
>
> But that matters not. The brewer knows the cost of both. Aluminum is cheaper.
> The brewer would never have switched if it were not. Again, this is a change
> based upon costs not what is in fashion.
You don't know that. Fashion may play some role somewhere in the supply
chain. But my point was you claimed that steel "required a specialized
factory near the end user" when in fact both are made in the same place
in the same way. There are cost differences no doubt just not what you
said they were.
>
> > I'm
> > not advocating steel just your analysis of sustainability always seems
> > to entirely consist of comparing it to all the other unsustainable
> > things that could be done instead.
>
> What would you consider sustainable in the case of packaging beer in
> convenient sizes vice quarter, half and full barrels?
>
> >> Given the state of hygiene not to mention all the costs of the old reusable
> >> glass bottles I can make people sick of that idea of going back to them. I was
> >> just a kid. All the cockroaches in them stacked out back of the store was fun.
> >> I never even knew the cockroaches went inside the grocery. Bottle deposits
> >> were to cover costs for breakage not to keep trash off the streets.
>
> > It is not as if packaging was designed to be any more energy efficient
> > 50 years ago either. Your whole premise is we must either do what we are
> > doing now or go back and do what we used to be doing (which in most
> > cases was even more foolish that what we do now) - according to you
> > there is nothing else. What you present are not choices they are only
> > designed solely to make it appear that choosing is not very appealing.
>
> The total cost of glass is greater than steel which is greater than aluminum.
> This is not speculation. This is real world experience.
Except that glass is still used, which is due to fashion probably. But
all your cost analysis are based on more frog analysis. If we had put a
heavy tax on petroleum 30 years ago, we might still have a steel
industry and a whole lot of other things might be different, including
the way things are packaged. If we had a steel industry I expect there
might be more steel pop cans.
You have no response when asked to analyze how any of that would look
if there was a high tax on oil. All you can do is the analysis based on
a world of low priced oil. If i want to see how things work in a world
of low priced oil all i have to do is look around. i don't need to read
a long rambling analysis.
>
> As above manpower costs are the greatest factor. In the good old days filled
> glass bottles were dropped off and empty ones loaded and they were NEVER
> stacked for easy loading but lets say they were. The reloading took as much
> time as unloading. The labor cost of delivering disposable cans is roughly
> half that of glass.
But that may or may not matter in a world where the cost of petroleum
was made higher.
What does matter is when you have huge number of people unemployed
because this myopic type of analysis ends up producing policies that end
up shipping too many of the jobs overseas.
>
> I am not trying to make anything appear like anything. I have simply
> described the reasons why today things are done differently than in the past.
> I am not arguing anything, just informing.
No you were arguing that the options are only 2 - what we are doing now
or what we used to do.
>
> > Besides the underlying problem in all your rambling is the same - most
> > of these enterprises of which you speak are going to be major problems
> > whenever energy costs spikes upward.
>
> By definition spikes are short term events. During the last spike most
> companies were capitalized well enough they were able to avoid raising prices
> to cover energy costs. It was a minor problem.
It was a short term event only because the entire world economy
collapsed. And most companies couldn't raise prices because everybody
stopped purchasing anything they didn't really need. And all you can
say is "It was a minor problem"?
>
> > This is because they really aren't
> > at all sustainable for even a little while without cheap energy. You
> > refuse to look at anything that might work in an environment of costly
> > energy because your only real agenda is that we must have easy cheap
> > energy. That is your whole focus. It is not how can we do things that
> > will be sustainable but how can we crawl back into that comfortable
> > cocoon of cheap easy energy. So you construct all these scenarios
> > around easy cheap energy, refusing to even contemplate anything else
> > might even exist.
>
> I have no agenda in this matter. I do not own any stock, period. My income is
> federal government with no relation to any energy related issue in any manner.
> I have no connection in any manner with any aspect of any industry beyond a
> normal consumer/customer. There are no legalisms or weasel words or hidden
> meanings in those statements.
You are saying is you have no idea how exactly far under the sand your
head is?
>
> That said, spikes are short term and can be weathered. Long term increases
> have never occurred. The cost of all things, inflation adjusted, has always
> decreased save for arbitrary government intrusion such as with marijuana.
> Middle term increases usually go up but in the long term always go down.
This is a theory of no upper limits to supply and materials . Gold and
diamonds go up and are good long term investments even though they are
mostly useless to their owners and it is because of limited supply. It
seems pretty unrealistic to just wave your hands and say there won't
ever be limited supply of these other materials.
>
> Despite the spike in oil prices, in the US gasoline was only higher than the
> price in the 1950s for about two months with adjustment for inflation. At the
> present price for oil it is cheaper than it was in the 1950s. Inflation is a
> nasty thing. It is also official government policy to create inflation rather
> than aim for zero inflation and suffer periods of deflation. And fools wonder
> why people do not put money in the banks in savings accounts.
And this is your definition of sustainable future -> price of oil at
1950 levels forever?
I think that is a fantasy. Apparently a large portion of the human race
disagrees with me and therefore makes no attempt to do anything about
it( i. e. conserve energy). That seems to me makes it even more likely I
will be right.
>
> The prices of things continues to decrease even though over the last century
> or so we have had to move to lower quality sources for raw materials. A good
> example is iron ore of which there are two basic kinds and whose names I do
> not recall. The richest form found in the US was depleted by WWI, I not II.
> Since then our local sources have been the lower yield kind which does come in
> richness levels, ounces per ton. Even as producers move to lower grades of ore
> the long term price of iron continues to fall.
And how does this benefit the average working Joe that gets his labor
taxed like crazy and then finds out his job left for china because the
labor portion of his production output cost too much? Maybe he wouldn't
mind paying a little more for the iron in his life if in exchange he
doesn't get his job down-sized to a lower paying job every 5 years or
so. And maybe the products made from iron would be a little more
durable and a little more efficiently made if there was more "arbitrary"
cost in the energy portion and less of that "arbitrary" cost applied to
the labor portion.
>
> >> A steel airplane cannot get off the ground, almost literally. Aluminum in
> >> cars is to reduce the energy requirement to move them.
>
> > Airplanes may have a tough time getting off the ground under any
> > circumstance without the current moderate government support being
> > replaced with massive government support.
>
> Again, I am talking engineering and you are talking politics.
>
> The main problem with airlines and in fact most business in the country and
> in the developed world in general is the thousands of shelf feet of tax law
> modeled on the fractal. All tax laws considered it is more profitable after
> taxes to do things which would be criminally stupid and firing offenses
> without the tax laws.
So make the tax laws simple and tax petroleum. It's not as if a blanket
excise tax would add much complexity to the laws.
The reality is that won't happen because people like you are addicted
and go into withdrawal shock just at the thought of any restriction to
oil. And then these same people protest that they have no agenda. Sure
like I'm going to believe a heroin addict or a wino has no agenda.
>
> A true fact is that home ownership does not makes sense for most people
> without the tax laws skewing the market. The laws skew the housing market so
> badly that they are the major contributor to housing booms and busts. The
> major thing is interest is deductible from income and payments are mostly
> interest in the beginning. That makes it much easier to own. But in
> maintenance and repair and upkeep the people who own only their own homes pay
> full market price for everything. And that means usually twice the price. And
> then try to move for job reasons when the market does not support quick turn
> overs. People look to good and bad times and rarely pay enough attention to
> learn the bad times more than negate the good.
>
> The only good news in this is the laws apply to everyone. And the rich have
> loopholes to protect themselves. Us peons can use the same loopholes if we can
> find them.
It all works the way it is designed to work.
>
> Sorry for the rambling but the problems of the airlines came about because of
> the tax laws. And for all the crocodile tears in interviews things are
> happening exactly to make a profit by means of the tax laws.
I don't disagree, and the airlines could be profitable if they stuck to
a few flights to a few major cities.
Your rambling about the way things work only illustrate that we are
already doing a lot worse things than taxing oil.
-jim
Rod Speed
Plenty of countrys havent operated like that and dont 'borrow from the future'.
> That borrowing from the future seems to suggest that we believe
> that either the future won't have scarce and costly petroleum or
> that it will have a perfect substitute for cheap petroleum.
Or that the particular country that chooses to operate like that
has decided that it prefers to pay the lowest interest rates we
have seen for a generation on the 'borrowing from the future'
instead of increasing taxation which they believe will dampen
down the economy at a time when its already doing worse
than they want it to do employment wise.
> Neither of those is very realistic IMO.
Your opinion is completely irrelevant. Its clearly an
approach that works. Thats what we did during the
great depression and WW2 and it worked fine.
Corse its currently got one real downside in that the chinese
may not be too keen on providing the funds forever.
> So it seems we are living a giant fantasy (i.e. hoping for a miracle).
No more than we did during the great depression and WW2.
Didnt need any miracle, just the effect of what was essentially
Keynesian deficit spending which clearly does work.
> The reality is we are headed for a colossal economic train wreck,
Why didnt the higher percentage of GDP in debt to fund WW2 produce that ?
> because the future won't hold cheap oil and will hold a lot of debt.
Our future does not depend on cheap oil. We can replace
most of it with natural gas and do the heating currently
done with natural gas with electricity from nukes instead.
More expensive oil is perfectly doable.
Even the use of oil as a chemical feedstock etc can
be replaced with coal if that makes economic sense.
>> If you like inside secrets here is a true fact. Regardless
>> of the huge cost of weapons systems the manpower costs of DOD is a
>> bit over 40%. Manpower
>> includes not just active duty pay but all costs which accrue to
>> people like retirement and CHAMPUS which is retiree health care. For
>> another fact back 20
>> years ago $6000 of every car out of Detroit went to the non-labor
>> direct labor
>> such as health insurance and retirement costs.
>>
>> It has nothing to do with efficiency because efficiency
>> offers trivial savings for the smallest fraction of the cost of
>> production. Efficiency is a standard factory process. But we cannot
>> see a 1/2% reduction in 15% of the
>> cost reflected in a price which is rounded to a few cents under the
>> next
>> highest dollar. If a profitable price is $8.23 the price will be
>> $8.96 or some
>> such. People won't buy otherwise. This has been tested. People will
>> buy for an $8.23 item when a $8.96 item is available even when
>> displayed side by side.
> Oh gimme a break Detroit should be allowed to go under.
The political reality is that it wont be.
> They could be profitable if they had not been delude by
> their belief that oil would be forever cheap and plentiful.
Wrong. That isnt the reason they arent profitable.
> And your efficiency analysis is just more frog analysis based on a complete
> unwillingness to look at how expensive petroleum could play into any of this.
Perfectly routine to change to natural gas if the oil gets too expensive.
Hordes are using natural gas right now.
>>>> Consider the beer/soda can. Making it of steel takes a
>>>> specialized factory near the end user as shipping finished cans
>>>> means shipping a lot of air.
>>> Geez... so what would be wrong with lots of specialized factories
>>> near the end user?
>> There is nothing "wrong" with it. It is that the cost of
>> local production of steel cans costs to much to be competitive. It
>> was done that way at one time. Production costs and selling price is
>> lower the way it is now.
> There are still a few local beverage "bottlers" that put there product
> in steel cans. I'm sure that aluminum is cheaper which is why there
> are only a few small companies that are still clinging to the old equipment.
It isnt just small ones that still use steel worldwide.
> I don't see the weight of the can being much of the issue.
> Steel used to be a big US industry. Now it isn't. Aluminum
> is still made in USA. Steel comes from Asia or Europe.
Some of it doesnt.
> If transportation costs were more of a cost factor steel would
> still be a big industry in the US. But obviously transportation is
> not very consequential if we can ship are scrap iron to china
> and they ship back sheet metal and structural steel.
China imports fuck all scrap iron. They make steel from iron ore instead.
>>> You say that as if it is a given that would be bad thing.
>>> I mean a machine that stamp out cans could be set up in your garage.
>> You must have some garage to stamp out 100,000+ cans a day.
>> That is only ~ 4000 cases a day, a very small brewery. 100,000 cans
>> would be only 33,000 drinkers at 3 a day each.
> The point was the can maker machine is at the bottling
> plant regardless of whether it is aluminum or steel.
>>> But just maybe the whole business of packaging should be
>>> considered in light of legitimate economic considerations rather
>>> than the phony
>>> economics that drive it now. Packaging is another segment of the
>>> economy that is just a vast mountain of waste just waiting to cave
>>> in like a house of cards when energy costs spike upwards.
>> Economic considerations are making a profit and nothing
>> more. Some people don't like profits. That is not very
>> bright. Remember the Cold War. They lost.
> Oh really so how is giving a trillion dollars to bankers fit in with
> your philosophy of "Economic considerations are making a profit
> and nothing more". That sure looks like something more to me.
> And you have expressed an interest in population control. The most
> effective population control is to give people old age security.
Wrong. By far the most effective population control is actually prosperity.
Thats why every single modern first world country isnt even
self replacing on population now if you take out immigration.
There's plenty of second world countrys that have old age security
that are reproducing at well over the self replacement rate.
> That way they don't have children just so somebody can take care of them in their old age.
Most of the world has moved on way past that factor now.
> There is no profit motive in providing social security and pensions,
Thats just plain wrong too with pension funds.
Not a chance. The europeans went that route and they dont.
> and a whole lot of other things might be different,
> including the way things are packaged.
Nope, europe is no different to the US on that.
> If we had a steel industry I expect there might be more steel pop cans.
You're wrong.
> You have no response when asked to analyze how
> any of that would look if there was a high tax on oil.
You're lying now. He rubbed your nose in the fact that europe tried
that route and we can see that it didnt produce the outcome you claim.
> All you can do is the analysis based on a world of low priced oil.
Wrong, we can see what heavily taxed oil in europe has produced.
All its really produced is more emphasis on car fuel economy than in the US.
Hasnt done a damned thing about the transport of commercial goods by truck etc.
> If i want to see how things work in a world of low priced oil all i have to do is look around.
Trouble is you do that with your blinkers on and ignore whats happened
in europe when they tried that approach because it doesnt fit your claims.
> i don't need to read a long rambling analysis.
We dont need your lies and mindless claims about frogs.
>> As above manpower costs are the greatest factor. In the good
>> old days filled glass bottles were dropped off and empty ones
>> loaded and they were NEVER stacked for easy loading but lets
>> say they were. The reloading took as much time as unloading.
>> The labor cost of delivering disposable cans is roughly half that of glass.
> But that may or may not matter in a world where the cost of petroleum was made higher.
We know it doesnt, because europe tried it.
> What does matter is when you have huge number of people unemployed
> because this myopic type of analysis ends up producing policies that end
> up shipping too many of the jobs overseas.
Another lie. The US unemployment rate bottomed at 4.x%
with an immense legal and illegal immigration rate. What
jobs have been shipped overseas are clearly not a problem.
>> I am not trying to make anything appear like anything. I have simply
>> described the reasons why today things are done differently than in
>> the past. I am not arguing anything, just informing.
> No you were arguing that the options are only 2
> - what we are doing now or what we used to do.
Thats dishonest.
More dishonesty.
You wont. At worst we will change to a different transport fuel.
>> The prices of things continues to decrease even though over
>> the last century or so we have had to move to lower quality sources
>> for raw materials. A good
>> example is iron ore of which there are two basic kinds and whose
>> names I do
>> not recall. The richest form found in the US was depleted by WWI, I
>> not II.
>> Since then our local sources have been the lower yield kind which
>> does come in richness levels, ounces per ton. Even as producers move
>> to lower grades of ore
>> the long term price of iron continues to fall.
> And how does this benefit the average working Joe that gets
> his labor taxed like crazy and then finds out his job left for china
> because the labor portion of his production output cost too much?
He gets a different job that cant be exported to china.
Just like those 95.x% of the country did.
> Maybe he wouldn't mind paying a little more for the iron
> in his life if in exchange he doesn't get his job down-sized
> to a lower paying job every 5 years or so.
Another lie.
> And maybe the products made from iron would be a little
> more durable and a little more efficiently made if there
> was more "arbitrary" cost in the energy portion and less
> of that "arbitrary" cost applied to the labor portion.
Have fun explaining why that doesnt happen in europe.
The real reason it doesnt is because no one in the west is prepared to work
for anything like the minimal wages those in china are prepared to work for.
Even the 'homeless' in the west arent.
>>>> A steel airplane cannot get off the ground, almost literally.
>>>> Aluminum in cars is to reduce the energy requirement to move them.
>>> Airplanes may have a tough time getting off the ground under
>>> any circumstance without the current moderate government
>>> support being replaced with massive government support.
>> Again, I am talking engineering and you are talking politics.
>> The main problem with airlines and in fact most business
>> in the country and in the developed world in general is the
>> thousands of shelf feet of tax law modeled on the fractal.
>> All tax laws considered it is more profitable after taxes to
>> do things which would be criminally stupid and firing
>> offenses without the tax laws.
> So make the tax laws simple and tax petroleum.
Europe tried that, it doesnt work.
> It's not as if a blanket excise tax would add much complexity to the laws.
Indeed, but it doesnt produce the result you want.
Manufacturing is still exported to china.
Essentially because they are prepared to work for wages
that no one in the west is prepared to work for anymore.
No arm waving on your part will ever change that.
> The reality is that won't happen because people like you are addicted
> and go into withdrawal shock just at the thought of any restriction to
> oil. And then these same people protest that they have no agenda.
> Sure like I'm going to believe a heroin addict or a wino has no agenda.
Your mindless hyperventilating changes nothing.
>> A true fact is that home ownership does not makes sense for
>> most people without the tax laws skewing the market. The laws skew
>> the housing market so
>> badly that they are the major contributor to housing booms and
>> busts. The
>> major thing is interest is deductible from income and payments are
>> mostly
>> interest in the beginning. That makes it much easier to own. But in
>> maintenance and repair and upkeep the people who own only their own
>> homes pay
>> full market price for everything. And that means usually twice the
>> price. And
>> then try to move for job reasons when the market does not support
>> quick turn
>> overs. People look to good and bad times and rarely pay enough
>> attention to
>> learn the bad times more than negate the good.
>> The only good news in this is the laws apply to everyone.
>> And the rich have loopholes to protect themselves. Us peons can use
>> the same loopholes if we can find them.
> It all works the way it is designed to work.
Mindless conspiracy theory.
>> Sorry for the rambling but the problems of the airlines came
>> about because of the tax laws. And for all the crocodile tears in
>> interviews things are
>> happening exactly to make a profit by means of the tax laws.
> I don't disagree, and the airlines could be profitable
> if they stuck to a few flights to a few major cities.
Nope, competition would still be too aggressive and they still wouldnt be profitable.
> Your rambling about the way things work only illustrate that
> we are already doing a lot worse things than taxing oil.
And taxing oil hasnt helped europe one iota.
Matt Giwer
> Matt Giwer wrote
>> jim wrote
>>> Matt Giwer wrote
>>>>>> Food for a particular size population will take a certain amount of acreage.
>>>>> Not necessarily.
>>>> What might be the difference as you see it?
>>>> If you mean going veggie that really does not work either.
>>>> Grain is graded by quality. People would not like eating the grain we feed to cattle.
>>> That is false. If everyone in the US decided to stop eating meat,
>>> there is no reason to believe there would need to be any degradation
>>> of the quality of grain people eat - You just made that up out of
>>> thin air. I'm not advocating veggie, just pointing out your
>>> arguments are based on stuff you make up to support what you like.
>> First you say I made it up and then you go on to give one example of
>> why I am correct.
> Not really. People do in fact today eat quite a bit of grain
> that was once considered only suitable for animals.
I am always willing to learn. What exactly are you talking about? One assumes
you are not talking about maize in Europe. I am talking about quality levels
in the same grain.
--
When Israel says its hand is outstretched for peace it
means it is planning military action.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 4161
http://www.giwersworld.org/israel/bombings.phtml a5
Mon Jul 27 19:28:25 EDT 2009
jim
Rod Speed wrote:
>
> > So it seems we are living a giant fantasy (i.e. hoping for a miracle).
>
> No more than we did during the great depression and WW2.
>
> Didnt need any miracle, just the effect of what was essentially
> Keynesian deficit spending which clearly does work.
>
> > The reality is we are headed for a colossal economic train wreck,
>
> Why didnt the higher percentage of GDP in debt to fund WW2 produce that ?
There are different forms of debt, but it won't be long before the ratio
of every form of US debt to GDP will be higher than WWII or any other
point in history.
http://www.comstockfunds.com/files/NLPP00000%5C292.pdf
>
> > because the future won't hold cheap oil and will hold a lot of debt.
>
> Our future does not depend on cheap oil. We can replace
> most of it with natural gas and do the heating currently
> done with natural gas with electricity from nukes instead.
>
> More expensive oil is perfectly doable.
I agree and that is the future we should be expecting and preparing for.
>
> By far the most effective population control is actually prosperity.
True because it means you will be secure when you get old or disabled.
>
> Thats why every single modern first world country isnt even
> self replacing on population now if you take out immigration.
>
> There's plenty of second world countrys that have old age security
> that are reproducing at well over the self replacement rate.
Hmmm, Care to name one.
>
> > You have no response when asked to analyze how
> > any of that would look if there was a high tax on oil.
>
> You're lying now. He rubbed your nose in the fact that europe tried
> that route and we can see that it didnt produce the outcome you claim.
The desired outcome is to move towards an economy that can sustain
itself when oil becomes more expensive on a permanent basis.
>
> > All you can do is the analysis based on a world of low priced oil.
>
> Wrong, we can see what heavily taxed oil in europe has produced.
And that would be what?
>
> All its really produced is more emphasis on car fuel economy than in the US.
Well that is not all but it is something.
>
> Hasnt done a damned thing about the transport of commercial goods by truck etc.
Not as much effect in that sector of transportation because of
interaction with VAT negates the effect.
-jim
Rod Speed
> Rod Speed wrote:
>> jim" <"sjedgingN0Sp wrote:
>>> It may well be possible to argue that this has been a wonderful system,
>>> but there is one little problem. It only works as long as the fuel for
>>> distribution and procurement of materials remains cheap and plentiful.
Thats just plain wrong. Europe managed fine with it not being cheap at all.
>>> Whenever the fuel and some of the materials (i.e. petroleum)
>>> becomes costly the whole system collapses like a house of cards.
Fantasy. We can change to natural gas if it gets too expensive.
>>> Over the last 30 years we have developed a system whereby we
>>> manage to ignore this inconvenient reality because we bail ourselves
>>> out of the mess each time it falls over by borrowing from the future.
>> Plenty of countrys havent operated like that and dont 'borrow from the future'.
>>> That borrowing from the future seems to suggest that we believe
>>> that either the future won't have scarce and costly petroleum or
>>> that it will have a perfect substitute for cheap petroleum.
>> Or that the particular country that chooses to operate like that
>> has decided that it prefers to pay the lowest interest rates we
>> have seen for a generation on the 'borrowing from the future'
>> instead of increasing taxation which they believe will dampen
>> down the economy at a time when its already doing worse
>> than they want it to do employment wise.
>>> Neither of those is very realistic IMO.
>> Your opinion is completely irrelevant. Its clearly an
>> approach that works. Thats what we did during the
>> great depression and WW2 and it worked fine.
>> Corse its currently got one real downside in that the chinese
>> may not be too keen on providing the funds forever.
>>> So it seems we are living a giant fantasy (i.e. hoping for a miracle).
>> No more than we did during the great depression and WW2.
>> Didnt need any miracle, just the effect of what was essentially
>> Keynesian deficit spending which clearly does work.
>>> The reality is we are headed for a colossal economic train wreck,
>> Why didnt the higher percentage of GDP in debt to fund WW2 produce that ?
> There are different forms of debt, but it won't be long
> before the ratio of every form of US debt to GDP
> will be higher than WWII or any other point in history.
> http://www.comstockfunds.com/files/NLPP00000%5C292.pdf
When we survived the great depression and WW2 debt fine,
whose to say that we wont survive say double that fine too ?
>>> because the future won't hold cheap oil and will hold a lot of debt.
>> Our future does not depend on cheap oil. We can replace
>> most of it with natural gas and do the heating currently
>> done with natural gas with electricity from nukes instead.
>> More expensive oil is perfectly doable.
> I agree and that is the future we should be expecting and preparing for.
No need to prepare for it. The technology is already very well established,
Japan and France are already generating 95% of their electricity using nukes
and plenty of people are already using natural gas in their cars. All the taxis in
my town have been 100% powered by natural gas for more than a decade now.
>>> And you have expressed an interest in population control. The most
>>> effective population control is to give people old age security.
>> By far the most effective population control is actually prosperity.
> True because it means you will be secure when you get old or disabled.
>> Thats why every single modern first world country isnt even
>> self replacing on population now if you take out immigration.
>> There's plenty of second world countrys that have old age security
>> that are reproducing at well over the self replacement rate.
> Hmmm, Care to name one.
Ireland.
>>> You have no response when asked to analyze how
>>> any of that would look if there was a high tax on oil.
>> You're lying now. He rubbed your nose in the fact that europe tried
>> that route and we can see that it didnt produce the outcome you claim.
> The desired outcome is to move towards an economy that can sustain
> itself when oil becomes more expensive on a permanent basis.
And europe is no better on that than america is. Worse in fact because
it doesnt have anything like the natural gas reserves available to the US.
>>> All you can do is the analysis based on a world of low priced oil.
>> Wrong, we can see what heavily taxed oil in europe has produced.
> And that would be what?
Nothing like what you claim would be the result of heavily taxed oil in the US.
>> All its really produced is more emphasis on car fuel economy than in the US.
> Well that is not all but it is something.
Fuck all in fact as far as reducing their dependance on oil is concerned.
>> Hasnt done a damned thing about the transport of commercial goods by truck etc.
> Not as much effect in that sector of transportation because of interaction with VAT negates the effect.
Like hell it does. It hasnt seen them move most of their commercial goods by say electric powered rail.
Rod Speed
> Rod Speed wrote
>> Matt Giwer wrote
>>> jim wrote
>>>> Matt Giwer wrote
>>>>>>> Food for a particular size population will take a certain amount of acreage.
>>>>>> Not necessarily.
>>>>> What might be the difference as you see it?
>>>>> If you mean going veggie that really does not work either.
>>>>> Grain is graded by quality. People would not like eating the grain we feed to cattle.
>>>> That is false. If everyone in the US decided to stop eating meat,
>>>> there is no reason to believe there would need to be any degradation of the quality of grain people eat - You just
>>>> made that up out of thin air. I'm not advocating veggie, just pointing out your arguments are based on stuff you
>>>> make up to support what you like.
>>> First you say I made it up and then you go on to give one example of
>>> why I am correct.
>> Not really. People do in fact today eat quite a bit of grain
>> that was once considered only suitable for animals.
> I am always willing to learn. What exactly are you talking about?
Stuff like muesli etc.
> One assumes you are not talking about maize in Europe.
Nope.
> I am talking about quality levels in the same grain.
I am talking about grain that was once almost exclusively used as animal feed which isnt anymore.
Chris
I have seen it written that we have reached that limit. The next step is a
population crash. We are running out of space to grow food and out of oil.
Once we run out of oil everything changes.
The population will crash all over the world. Billions will die.
Then things will get better as the new world order develops a sustainable
economy.
I will not live to see the transision as I am 66 with heart disease and
cannot live much longer.
Rod Speed
> We just have to accept that our planet can only support a finite population.
Mindless silly stuff.
> I have seen it written that we have reached that limit.
And only fools like you believe something that is written.
> The next step is a population crash.
Nope. What we will actually see is prosperity producing
more non self replacing countrys than we already have.
> We are running out of space to grow food
Pig ignorant lie.
> and out of oil.
Completely trivial to replace that with other sources of oil.
> Once we run out of oil everything changes.
Wont ever happen.
> The population will crash all over the world. Billions will die.
Only in your pathetic little pig ignorant fantasyland. Didnt happen with whale oil.
> Then things will get better as the new world order develops a sustainable economy.
Only in your pathetic little pig ignorant fantasyland.
> I will not live to see the transision as I am 66 with heart disease and cannot live much longer.
Great. Cut to the chase and hang yourself.
Tim Heise
At least you will be spared the coming cataclysm.
//
tbh
Matt Giwer
> Matt Giwer wrote
>> Rod Speed wrote
>>> Matt Giwer wrote
>>>> jim wrote
>>>>> Matt Giwer wrote
>>>>>>>> Food for a particular size population will take a certain amount of acreage.
>>>>>>> Not necessarily.
>>>>>> What might be the difference as you see it?
>>>>>> If you mean going veggie that really does not work either.
>>>>>> Grain is graded by quality. People would not like eating the grain we feed to cattle.
>>>>> That is false. If everyone in the US decided to stop eating meat,
>>>>> there is no reason to believe there would need to be any degradation of the quality of grain people eat - You just
>>>>> made that up out of thin air. I'm not advocating veggie, just pointing out your arguments are based on stuff you
>>>>> make up to support what you like.
>>>> First you say I made it up and then you go on to give one example of
>>>> why I am correct.
>>> Not really. People do in fact today eat quite a bit of grain
>>> that was once considered only suitable for animals.
>> I am always willing to learn. What exactly are you talking about?
> Stuff like muesli etc.
Muesli is a cereal made from toasted whole oats, nuts, fruit and typically
wheat flakes. Since it uses whole grains, it is high in dietary fiber, and
because it relies on the natural sweetness of the fructose in fruit, it is
also low in sucrose. Depending upon the proportion of nuts, it can also be
relatively high in protein, unlike most other breakfast cereal.
There were many other hits. That description is not of quality level. I have
no idea how long people have eaten oats. Given all the old brand names in the
breakfast cereal section I'd say at least a century. It is not conceivable you
are talking about the other ingredients.
So far as I am aware it was never like maize in Europe (corn in the US) which
was not considered a human food for a long time.
>> One assumes you are not talking about maize in Europe.
> Nope.
>> I am talking about quality levels in the same grain.
> I am talking about grain that was once almost exclusively used as animal feed which isnt anymore.
Then we are not talking about the same thing. I do not see how I could have
been more clear in my original statement of quality differences. I even went
to the extent of giving a non-food example.
--
Today every child knows more about the world than all the popes and all the
Luthers and all the Calvins, They know about gravity instead of believing a
god pushes them down. Our children are infinitely wiser.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 4170
http://www.giwersworld.org/antisem/ Antisemitism a10
Tue Jul 28 18:23:54 EDT 2009
Matt Giwer
> I will not live to see the transision as I am 66 with heart disease and
> cannot live much longer.
Then why waste your time talking about it?
--
Only believers in god would kill believers in god.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 4168
http://www.giwersworld.org/israel/is-seg.phtml a14
Tue Jul 28 18:33:29 EDT 2009
Matt Giwer
>
> Matt Giwer wrote:
>> jim wrote:
>>> Matt Giwer wrote:
>>>>>> Food for a particular size population will take a certain amount of acreage.
>>>>> Not necessarily.
>>>> What might be the difference as you see it?
>>>> If you mean going veggie that really does not work either. Grain is graded by
>>>> quality. People would not like eating the grain we feed to cattle.
>>> That is false. If everyone in the US decided to stop eating meat, there
>>> is no reason to believe there would need to be any degradation of the
>>> quality of grain people eat - You just made that up out of thin air. I'm
>>> not advocating veggie, just pointing out your arguments are based on
>>> stuff you make up to support what you like.
>> First you say I made it up and then you go on to give one example of why I am
>> correct.
>
> You said "People would not like eating the grain we feed to cattle".
> That is what I said was not true. People are already eating the same
> grain that cattle eat. If the amount of grain people decided to eat
> doubled it wouldn't change anything about the quality of grain people
> eat or how they like it.
Lets see what I said.
>>>> If you mean going veggie that really does not work either. Grain
is graded by
>>>> quality. People would not like eating the grain we feed to cattle.
Does selective quoting grant the ability to pretend I was not referring to
quality?
While I like a good discussion, I can get misrepresention and selective
quoting out the biblehuggers currently infesting sci.arc and
soc.history.ancient. Perhaps I should repeat my usual response and go do
something else for a few months until reasonable people return.
--
Lebanon became a democracy in 1943, five years before Jews started claiming
they had the first and only democracy in the Middle East.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 4172
http://www.giwersworld.org/holo/nizgas3.html a4
Tue Jul 28 18:35:30 EDT 2009
Rod Speed
>>>>>>>> Not necessarily.
>> Stuff like muesli etc.
Irrelevant to my point that today people eat quite a bit
of grain that used in the past to be fed to animals.
> There were many other hits. That description is not of quality level.
> I have no idea how long people have eaten oats.
Forever basically, mostly as porridge.
> Given all the old brand names in the breakfast cereal section I'd say at least a century.
Far longer than that in fact.
> It is not conceivable you are talking about the other ingredients.
Yes, but it isnt the only grain thats eaten a lot more than it used to be.
> So far as I am aware it was never like maize in Europe (corn in the US) which was not considered a human food for a
> long time.
There's more grains than just wheat and oats.
>>> One assumes you are not talking about maize in Europe.
>> Nope.
>>> I am talking about quality levels in the same grain.
>> I am talking about grain that was once almost exclusively used as animal feed which isnt anymore.
> Then we are not talking about the same thing.
Yes we are.
> I do not see how I could have been more clear in my original statement of quality differences. I even went to the
> extent of giving a non-food example.
Your claimed that people would not eat the grain that is fed to animals.
That is just plain wrong. Hordes of them do today.
jim
When did I pretend you were not referring to quality?
Here is what I wrote:
"If the amount of grain people decided to eat
doubled it wouldn't change anything about the quality of grain
people eat or how they like it. "
You just don't understand how agriculture works. Farmers produce X
amount of the higher quality grain because the markets will only buy X
amount of grain for human consumption. If the market suddenly increased
its demand to 4X amount of higher quality grain there will be no problem
producing that amount. By the same token if people decided to eat more
meat and less grain and the market only needed X/2 amount of grain for
human consumption then farmers would only produce X/2 amount of the high
quality grain.
>
> While I like a good discussion, I can get misrepresention and selective
> quoting out the biblehuggers currently infesting sci.arc and
> soc.history.ancient. Perhaps I should repeat my usual response and go do
> something else for a few months until reasonable people return.
Or you could just whine and piss and moan. geez.....
Matt Giwer
When you have no point at all I do not see why you are bothering to reply.
>> There were many other hits. That description is not of quality level.
>> I have no idea how long people have eaten oats.
> Forever basically, mostly as porridge.
Then it is not even a new grain people eat.
>> Given all the old brand names in the breakfast cereal section I'd say at least a century.
>
> Far longer than that in fact.
>
>> It is not conceivable you are talking about the other ingredients.
>
> Yes, but it isnt the only grain thats eaten a lot more than it used to be.
I said QUALITY not type,
>> So far as I am aware it was never like maize in Europe (corn in the US) which was not considered a human food for a
>> long time.
>
> There's more grains than just wheat and oats.
Which is not relevant to quality.
>>>> One assumes you are not talking about maize in Europe.
>
>>> Nope.
>
>>>> I am talking about quality levels in the same grain.
>
>>> I am talking about grain that was once almost exclusively used as animal feed which isnt anymore.
>
>> Then we are not talking about the same thing.
>
> Yes we are.
As we do not share a common set of meanings for words there is no way to have
a discussion on this and likely any subject.
--
There is no known connection between Qumran and the Essenes. There is no
known connection between the Dead Sea Scrolls and either the Essenes or
Qumran. People believe the strangest things.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 4158
http://www.giwersworld.org/antisem/ Antisemitism a10
Wed Jul 29 02:02:55 EDT 2009
Matt Giwer
> Jim,
> Matt is active in sci.astro.seti.
> He did not see your response, so I added that group again here.
> But do not expect much of understanding your point of view...
> I let him summarize his position, but I've had long discussions with him in
> the past, regarding sustainability of civilisations, and did not get very
> far. Good thing is that the discussions were never boring nor insulting.
Where did you find these fools and how did it get crossposted to sci.astro.seti?
--
Only believers in god would kill believers in god.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 4168
http://www.giwersworld.org/disinfo/occupied-2.phtml a6
Wed Jul 29 02:07:55 EDT 2009
Rod Speed
>>>>>>>>>> Not necessarily.
>>>> Stuff like muesli etc.
You're lying now.
> I do not see why you are bothering to reply.
Your problem.
>>> There were many other hits. That description is not of quality level.
>>> I have no idea how long people have eaten oats.
>> Forever basically, mostly as porridge.
> Then it is not even a new grain people eat.
Never ever said it was.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muesli#Packaged_muesli
Packaged muesli is a loose mixture of mainly rolled oats together
with various pieces of dried fruit, nuts, and seeds. It commonly
contains other rolled cereal grains such as wheat or rye flakes as well.
It does in fact contain quite a bit of lower grade grains that was once considered
suitable only for animals and even you should have noticed that quite a bit of
muesli is eaten today, in spite of your stupid claim much higher up.
And muesli isnt the only grain product that was once considered only suitable for animals.
>>> Given all the old brand names in the breakfast cereal section I'd say at least a century.
>> Far longer than that in fact.
>>> It is not conceivable you are talking about the other ingredients.
>> Yes, but it isnt the only grain thats eaten a lot more than it used to be.
> I said QUALITY not type,
I didnt say anything about type. I was referring to the QUALITY.
>>> So far as I am aware it was never like maize in Europe (corn in the US) which was not considered a human food for a
>>> long time.
>> There's more grains than just wheat and oats.
> Which is not relevant to quality.
But is relevant to what was always being discussed, the FACT
that we do today eat quite a bit of various grains the QUALITY
of which was once considered only suitable for animals.
>>>>> One assumes you are not talking about maize in Europe.
>>>> Nope.
>>>>> I am talking about quality levels in the same grain.
>>>> I am talking about grain that was once almost exclusively used as animal feed which isnt anymore.
>>> Then we are not talking about the same thing.
>> Yes we are.
> As we do not share a common set of meanings for words
You're lying, again.
> there is no way to have a discussion on this and likely any subject.
Bare faced lying now.
Rob Dekker
"Matt Giwer" <jul...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote in message
news:4a6fe78b$0$4968$9a6e...@unlimited.newshosting.com...
> Rob Dekker wrote:
>> Jim,
>
>> Matt is active in sci.astro.seti.
>> He did not see your response, so I added that group again here.
>> But do not expect much of understanding your point of view...
>> I let him summarize his position, but I've had long discussions with him
>> in the past, regarding sustainability of civilisations, and did not get
>> very far. Good thing is that the discussions were never boring nor
>> insulting.
>
> Where did you find these fools and how did it get crossposted to
> sci.astro.seti?
>
Matt,
I crossposted my first reply of the original post in "sci.energy" to
"sci.astro.seti", since this is where we have discussed sustainability of
civilisations and the Fermi paradox several times. I felt that there may be
interest in both groups on this subject.
Please ignore the postings from Rod Speed. He is a troll, and of the moron
type. Cannot keep context, nor does he have anything constructive to say.
Google "Rod Speed faq" if you are not already convinced that he should be in
your killfile.
Other posters on sci.energy are sometimes more constructive and there are
reasonable conversations there that may be interesting if you care about
long term energy solutions and sustainability in general.
Rob
Matt Giwer
> "Matt Giwer" <jul...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote in message
> news:4a6fe78b$0$4968$9a6e...@unlimited.newshosting.com...
>> Rob Dekker wrote:
>>> Jim,
>>> Matt is active in sci.astro.seti.
>>> He did not see your response, so I added that group again here.
>>> But do not expect much of understanding your point of view...
>>> I let him summarize his position, but I've had long discussions with him
>>> in the past, regarding sustainability of civilisations, and did not get
>>> very far. Good thing is that the discussions were never boring nor
>>> insulting.
>> Where did you find these fools and how did it get crossposted to
>> sci.astro.seti?
> Matt,
> I crossposted my first reply of the original post in "sci.energy" to
> "sci.astro.seti", since this is where we have discussed sustainability of
> civilisations and the Fermi paradox several times. I felt that there may be
> interest in both groups on this subject.
No blame.
Really just curious what motivated it and phrased a bit loosely given two
terminally stupid replies in a row.
As to Fermi, sustainable cannot be the answer as some rare places the
treehuggers may rule and in even rarer cases they may start spreading to the
stars. In in that rare case there are still to many billion years to explain
nothing at all.
There has to be something fundamentally wrong with our understanding of the
universe. As we are dealing with a sample size of one that is not so much a
speculation as a certainty.
Clearly there is a false choice between we are alone and they have to be
here. The old Greek philosophers were doing that to themselves all the time
even when they knew it was a fallacy. We do it to ourselves with big bang or
steady state.
--
When Israel talks about the city of Jerusalem it is talking
about occupied Jerusalem.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 4163
http://www.giwersworld.org/israel/bombings.phtml a5
Wed Jul 29 23:29:03 EDT 2009
Chris
Universe. Intelligent life, being the most successful, is also the most
common form of life.
And of all the human cutures the NAZI's got there first.
--
Chris.
Remove ns_ to reply
"Matt Giwer" <jul...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote in message
news:4a7116fd$0$5641$9a6e...@unlimited.newshosting.com...
Matt Giwer
> This is all rubbish as we are here already. Life is ubiquitous in the
> Universe. Intelligent life, being the most successful, is also the most
> common form of life.
Take a stress pill, Chris, and commit yourself for observation in the morning.
> And of all the human cutures the NAZI's got there first.
Before there were nations there were nationalist. Gotten love the intricacies
of the damaged brain.
--
Today every child knows more about the world than all the popes and all the
Luthers and all the Calvins, They know about gravity instead of believing a
god pushes them down. Our children are infinitely wiser.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 4170
http://www.giwersworld.org/israel/is-seg.phtml a14
Thu Jul 30 01:38:45 EDT 2009
Rob Dekker
That conclusion cannot be drawn unless you know something about probability
of emergence of technology civilisations in the Galaxy.
Either way, sustainability has to be crucial : At the very least, a
civilisation that expands through the Galaxy MUST sustain technology.
>
> There has to be something fundamentally wrong with our understanding of
> the universe. As we are dealing with a sample size of one that is not so
> much a speculation as a certainty.
>
There does not need to be anything wrong with our fundamental understanding
of the universe at all.
We know very little about the probability of intelligent, technological,
life emerging in the Galaxy (only that that probability is not zero). And
once an intelligence invents rockets, it is still far away from building
sustainable, independent colonies in space. Who knows what the chances are
to make even that small first important step towards colonisation.
Beyond that we know absolutely nothing about the probability of sustaining
technology and prolifirating of intelligent civilisations for millions of
years through the entire Galaxy. It is plausible that these probabilities
are so low that simply no intelligent life has made it yet. Or some made it
all the way through the Galaxy and dwindled after that.
Your point only makes sense if you believe that there is little chance that
intelligence can dwindle in a population and little chance in which we could
loose (interest in, or the ability to sustain) technology at some point in
the future. And we know nothing about such chances.
So to suggest that there is something fundamentally wrong with our
understanding of the universe is simply wild speculation.
> Clearly there is a false choice between we are alone and they have to be
> here. The old Greek philosophers were doing that to themselves all the
> time even when they knew it was a fallacy. We do it to ourselves with big
> bang or steady state.
What do you suggest as alternative ?
Matt Giwer
We do know something. There is one. The difference between 0 and 1 is
infinitely greater than between 1 and 2 or between 1 and 1 million. Therefore
we do know they do arise. This tells us nothing of the frequency of appearance
or perhaps density of them but we do know they arise.
The issue is then their appearance. If it takes a thousand years to travel
one light years then in a mere million years it is possible to travel a
thousand light years. In a mere billion years it is possible to travel
somewhat farther.
This planet is handicapped in the dominant land animals have only four limbs
with bilateral symmetry. That manipulating appendages are essential to a
technological civilization meant two legged locomotion was a prerequisite.
That is relatively rare. Had the dominant form been tripod plus one or more
than four the route to technology would not need pass through the bottleneck
of bipedal locomotion first.
> Either way, sustainability has to be crucial : At the very least, a
> civilisation that expands through the Galaxy MUST sustain technology.
At any time in human history an argument could have been made that the
technology of the time was unsustainable. Sustainability is a null argument.
That is basically what I don't like about it. The bronze age was not
sustainable for the shortage of tin. Farming was not sustainable for the
shortage of good bottom land near rivers. Cattle are unsustainable for the
shortage of pastureland.
The good news is war is forever limited as the amount of bronze available
limits the number of cannon that can be made. Ballista will always be limited
weapons as there is so little lead to use in place of stones. The population
density of cities is forever limited by the inability to dispose of the horse
manure from the number of horses needed.
Where will we ever get enough cattle for the tallow for candles? Then there
are whale oil lamps. The limited distance of the telegraph because of the
resistance of iron wires.
And of course now oil. The average recovery from a well is about 25%. If that
can be increased to to 40% the proven reserves will double but as no further
improvement is possible our's is not sustainable.
>> There has to be something fundamentally wrong with our understanding of
>> the universe. As we are dealing with a sample size of one that is not so
>> much a speculation as a certainty.
> There does not need to be anything wrong with our fundamental understanding
> of the universe at all.
But we can be 100% certain that there is much wrong with our understanding of
the universe. A century ago there were no galaxies. Four decades ago there
were Little Green Man with their beacons. Ten years ago there was neither dark
matter nor dark energy.
> We know very little about the probability of intelligent, technological,
> life emerging in the Galaxy (only that that probability is not zero).
A seeming quibble is my point. There is nothing with a probability of zero.
If a thing cannot happen probability cannot be applied nor can its
terminology. It can happen therefore it does happen and a mere billion years
after one arises the paradox is in play. There are too many billions of years
in our past to avoid the paradox.
> And
> once an intelligence invents rockets, it is still far away from building
> sustainable, independent colonies in space. Who knows what the chances are
> to make even that small first important step towards colonisation.
So it takes a million years to go from rockets to colonies. What is your
rush? Give it ten million years. I don't see a reason to hurry it along. The
universe will still be there when we get around to it.
> Beyond that we know absolutely nothing about the probability of sustaining
> technology and prolifirating of intelligent civilisations for millions of
> years through the entire Galaxy. It is plausible that these probabilities
> are so low that simply no intelligent life has made it yet. Or some made it
> all the way through the Galaxy and dwindled after that.
Again the "sustaining" issue. We have been to orbit and to the moon. We know
it can be done. The rest is in improving the methods. There is clearly no
limit in resources. Any appeal to a probability of surviving to spread is
balanced by the number of tries inherent in each species. It is not reasonable
to assume a monolithic effort limited to one step at a time if just for the
fact it is not an optimum strategy for success. Even our shot at the moon had
two involved. Japan, China and India have since joined in a mere 40 years. 40
thousand years would be fast enough.
> Your point only makes sense if you believe that there is little chance that
> intelligence can dwindle in a population and little chance in which we could
> loose (interest in, or the ability to sustain) technology at some point in
> the future. And we know nothing about such chances.
As we have no examples of devolution decreasing intelligence is in the can't
happen category. Populations diversify what they have. I think we agree humans
lost their interest in improving spears and swords a long time ago.
So would there be a loss of interest in space? There have been at least two
studies which show the number of profitable and beneficial uses of space are
proportional to the cost to get there with a few step functions. That is, it
is not a gradual increase but stepwise. This is nothing new. It happened with
cars and most obviously computers.
This means we are not talking about some abstract interest in space. It means
we are talking about improving our lives. Certainly an abstract interest can
be lost. An interest in improving our lives is fundamental to us.
> So to suggest that there is something fundamentally wrong with our
> understanding of the universe is simply wild speculation.
Despite the example of dark matter? Despite Viking accelerating? And if the
recent tests are positive, gravity decreasing during an eclipse? And with most
all formulations of gravity interactions in terms general relativity being
insolvable?
And with decreasing the cost to orbit by a factor of ten increases the
beneficial purposes of going there multiples of ten times? Everything we do is
no more than advanced forms of moving on when the local food is exhausted and
coming in out of the rain. It is difficult to imagine any species surviving
without such elementary interests.
>> Clearly there is a false choice between we are alone and they have to be
>> here. The old Greek philosophers were doing that to themselves all the
>> time even when they knew it was a fallacy. We do it to ourselves with big
>> bang or steady state.
> What do you suggest as alternative ?
If I had one I would publish. I am certain if Bacon had had a better idea
than phlogiston he would have written about it. If Galileo had the idea of
universal gravitation he might have gone for broke.
I will make a prediction for which there should be data in less than ten
years. When telescopes can finally see back to the time the "white out" ended
there will already be formed galaxies. I might publish then. If the "white
out" is not there, i.e. further back than can be explained by the bang, it
will be so much gravy on what I have in mind. In the mean time, speculation is
not science. Besides most theories are wrong. It makes you look dumb.
--
When Israel talks about Zionism it means a cult dedicated to
murdering Palestinians and stealing their private property.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 4164
http://www.giwersworld.org/holo2/ a11
Thu Jul 30 16:50:45 EDT 2009
jim
Matt Giwer wrote:
>
> At any time in human history an argument could have been made that the
> technology of the time was unsustainable. Sustainability is a null argument.
> That is basically what I don't like about it. The bronze age was not
> sustainable for the shortage of tin. Farming was not sustainable for the
> shortage of good bottom land near rivers. Cattle are unsustainable for the
> shortage of pastureland.
Except that is not based on fact but on what you wish to be true.
We know that in the past Iraq had ample rich farm land and plenty of
pasture land. more than enough for the needs of the population at the
time. It used to be as rich as the deep fertile soils of the upper
midwest U.S.A. The reason it is not fertile today is because of
centuries of unsustainable agriculture practices.
There haven't been many cultures that practiced sustainable
agriculture, but there have been a few. There were native people of the
Amazon that practiced agriculture in a way that looks like it could have
been indefinitely sustainable. In roughly the same period of time that
the farmers of Iraq were turning there rich soil into desert these
people started with very poor quality soil and made it much richer and
fertile as the centuries went by. More than 300 years after these tribes
were wiped out by small pox and influenza and other diseases brought
from the western world the soils that this culture produced is still so
rich today it is mined and sold to greenhouses and florists as potting
soil
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/publ/MicrobEcol%2058,%2023-35,%202009%20ONeill.pdf
>
> The good news is war is forever limited as the amount of bronze available
> limits the number of cannon that can be made. Ballista will always be limited
> weapons as there is so little lead to use in place of stones. The population
> density of cities is forever limited by the inability to dispose of the horse
> manure from the number of horses needed.
Using up one's own land and having to move someplace else and steal
somebody else's land was historically the basis of many wars. Even today
we see tribes wastefully using their own resources and then attacking
others to secure more resources.
The bottom line is that you can screw up your technology and social
order with whatever unsustainable practices you choose and the worst
is you go back to the dark ages and take another run at it. But if you
turn the land into desert then it may be all over but the shouting. The
forests are our major source of oxygen.
>
> Where will we ever get enough cattle for the tallow for candles? Then there
> are whale oil lamps. The limited distance of the telegraph because of the
> resistance of iron wires.
Do you know the original use of the word tree hugger? It is from the
Reni tribe in the Himalayas that lived off the forest. Much of their
wealth came from trees. They tapped pine trees for the pine oil, tar and
turpentine used for their heat and light source and waterproofing and
used the needles for roofing and bedding. They also had relied for
centuries on nuts, and fruits and leaves from trees to feed themselves
and their livestock and got honey from the bees that lived in the
trees. n the steep hills there wasn't much land that was flat enough to
farm. All of these things that supported their life had been harvested
in a sustainable way for as long as anyone could remember. Although
illiterate and uneducated they understood that the trees were the
source of the purity of the water, soil and air which gave them life.
They understood better than the forest management people that cutting
down a single tree meant the loss of the surrounding soil in the steep
hills they live in. When civilization came to the valley in which they
lived and wanted to cut down the forest for lumber that was when the
tree hugger movement began. And they were successful in preserving their
forests as well as inspiring a much needed movement of forest
preservation that spread throughout India in short time.
http://www.iisd.org/50comm/commdb/desc/d07.htm
>
> And of course now oil. The average recovery from a well is about 25%. If that
> can be increased to to 40% the proven reserves will double but as no further
> improvement is possible our's is not sustainable.
Man may look back at the current era and realize petroleum energy could
have been a stepping stone to other energy sources. The amount of energy
needed to build nuclear plant is very large. The same with wind or tidal
energy. They will wonder how the people could have just burned so much
of it up so quickly and inefficiently and most of the industry and
infrastructure built seemed to be devoted solely to facilitate the
burning of oil.
-jim
Rod Speed
> Matt Giwer wrote
>> At any time in human history an argument could have been
>> made that the technology of the time was unsustainable.
>> Sustainability is a null argument.
>> That is basically what I don't like about it. The bronze age
>> was not sustainable for the shortage of tin. Farming was
>> not sustainable for the shortage of good bottom land near
>> rivers. Cattle are unsustainable for the shortage of pastureland.
> Except that is not based on fact but on what you wish to be true.
Yours in spades.
> We know that in the past Iraq had ample rich farm land and plenty of pasture
> land. more than enough for the needs of the population at the time. It used to
> be as rich as the deep fertile soils of the upper midwest U.S.A.
You dont know that.
> The reason it is not fertile today is because of
> centuries of unsustainable agriculture practices.
And that in spades. Its much more likely to be due to climate change.
And its still sustainable right now anyway.
> There haven't been many cultures that practiced
> sustainable agriculture, but there have been a few.
And hordes more that couldnt do anything about climate change.
> There were native people of the Amazon that practiced agriculture
> in a way that looks like it could have been indefinitely sustainable.
Pretty primitive agriculture tho. Its hardly surprising that
hunting and gathering is sustainable quite a bit of the time.
> In roughly the same period of time that the farmers
> of Iraq were turning there rich soil into desert
You dont know that they did.
> these people started with very poor quality soil and made it
> much richer and fertile as the centuries went by. More than
> 300 years after these tribes were wiped out by small pox
> and influenza and other diseases brought from the western
> world the soils that this culture produced is still so rich today
> it is mined and sold to greenhouses and florists as potting soil
Not because its rich.
> http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/publ/MicrobEcol%2058,%2023-35,%202009%20ONeill.pdf
>> The good news is war is forever limited as the amount of
>> bronze available limits the number of cannon that can be made.
>> Ballista will always be limited weapons as there is so little lead
>> to use in place of stones. The population density of cities is
>> forever limited by the inability to dispose of the horse
>> manure from the number of horses needed.
> Using up one's own land and having to move someplace else and
> steal somebody else's land was historically the basis of many wars.
Wrong again. Fuck all in fact.
> Even today we see tribes wastefully using their own resources
> and then attacking others to secure more resources.
Nope. We do see quite a bit of that approach, but no wars as a result of it.
> The bottom line is that you can screw up your technology and social
> order with whatever unsustainable practices you choose and the
> worst is you go back to the dark ages and take another run at it.
That wasnt what produced the dark ages.
> But if you turn the land into desert then it may be all over but the shouting.
And if climate change does that, you're fucked and may well die out.
> The forests are our major source of oxygen.
Pig ignorant fantasy.
>> Where will we ever get enough cattle for the tallow for
>> candles? Then there are whale oil lamps. The limited distance
>> of the telegraph because of the resistance of iron wires.
> Do you know the original use of the word tree hugger? It is from the
> Reni tribe in the Himalayas that lived off the forest. Much of their
> wealth came from trees. They tapped pine trees for the pine oil, tar
> and turpentine used for their heat and light source and waterproofing
> and used the needles for roofing and bedding. They also had relied for
> centuries on nuts, and fruits and leaves from trees to feed
> themselves and their livestock and got honey from the bees that lived
> in the trees. n the steep hills there wasn't much land that was flat
> enough to farm. All of these things that supported their life had
> been harvested in a sustainable way for as long as anyone could
> remember. Although illiterate and uneducated they understood that
> the trees were the source of the purity of the water, soil and air
> which gave them life. They understood better than the forest
> management people that cutting down a single tree meant the loss of
> the surrounding soil in the steep hills they live in. When
> civilization came to the valley in which they lived and wanted to
> cut down the forest for lumber that was when the tree hugger movement
> began. And they were successful in preserving their forests as well
> as inspiring a much needed movement of forest preservation that
> spread throughout India in short time.
> http://www.iisd.org/50comm/commdb/desc/d07.htm
Pure bullshit. The himalayas dont depend on the trees.
>> And of course now oil. The average recovery from a well is about 25%.
>> If that can be increased to to 40% the proven reserves will double but
>> as no further improvement is possible our's is not sustainable.
> Man may look back at the current era and realize petroleum energy
> could have been a stepping stone to other energy sources.
Nope, ee invented other much more viable energy sources like nukes fine without that.
> The amount of energy needed to build nuclear plant is very large.
The nuke replaces that in no time at all.
> The same with wind or tidal energy.
Wrong again.
> They will wonder how the people could have just burned so much of it up
> so quickly and inefficiently and most of the industry and infrastructure
> built seemed to be devoted solely to facilitate the burning of oil.
Nope.
Chris
fools.
--
Chris.
Remove ns_ to reply
"Matt Giwer" <jul...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote in message
news:4a71327c$0$5657$9a6e...@unlimited.newshosting.com...
Rob Dekker
My point exactly. The issue is that we cannot draw any conclusions with
that, including any conclusion about the Fermi paradox, or that billions of
years of nothing means anything.
> The issue is then their appearance. If it takes a thousand years to travel
> one light years then in a mere million years it is possible to travel a
> thousand light years. In a mere billion years it is possible to travel
> somewhat farther.
I think the travel time is not the issue.
>
> This planet is handicapped in the dominant land animals have only four
> limbs with bilateral symmetry. That manipulating appendages are essential
> to a technological civilization meant two legged locomotion was a
> prerequisite. That is relatively rare. Had the dominant form been tripod
> plus one or more than four the route to technology would not need pass
> through the bottleneck of bipedal locomotion first.
Apparently, on planet Earth, symmetric four limb creatures apparently took
the upper hand at least in the more 'intelligent' forms of life. There must
have been certain selection criteria for that, like efficiency and
effectiveness in the environment.
Still, I do no see why this has to be 'rare', or why it would have delayed
development of intelligence and technology.
It almost seems that we are optimized : If any 5-limbed species were
'intelligent', then they could have done with only 4 limbs, rendering the
5th limb obsolete (OT: using this argument, the female homo sapiens are more
efficient than male form :o).
>
>> Either way, sustainability has to be crucial : At the very least, a
>> civilisation that expands through the Galaxy MUST sustain technology.
>
> At any time in human history an argument could have been made that the
> technology of the time was unsustainable. Sustainability is a null
> argument. That is basically what I don't like about it. The bronze age was
> not sustainable for the shortage of tin. Farming was not sustainable for
> the shortage of good bottom land near rivers. Cattle are unsustainable for
> the shortage of pastureland.
>
> The good news is war is forever limited as the amount of bronze available
> limits the number of cannon that can be made. Ballista will always be
> limited weapons as there is so little lead to use in place of stones. The
> population density of cities is forever limited by the inability to
> dispose of the horse manure from the number of horses needed.
>
> Where will we ever get enough cattle for the tallow for candles? Then
> there are whale oil lamps. The limited distance of the telegraph because
> of the resistance of iron wires.
>
> And of course now oil. The average recovery from a well is about 25%. If
> that can be increased to to 40% the proven reserves will double but as no
> further improvement is possible our's is not sustainable.
All good points, but that was not the issue that I brought up.
The issue is that it is NOT certain that technology is something that will
be around forever now that we reached it.
Technology requires intelligence, and intelligence is not a sure thing in
evolution. See below for some plausible explanations of this point.
>
>>> There has to be something fundamentally wrong with our understanding of
>>> the universe. As we are dealing with a sample size of one that is not so
>>> much a speculation as a certainty.
>
>> There does not need to be anything wrong with our fundamental
>> understanding of the universe at all.
>
> But we can be 100% certain that there is much wrong with our understanding
> of the universe. A century ago there were no galaxies. Four decades ago
> there were Little Green Man with their beacons. Ten years ago there was
> neither dark matter nor dark energy.
>
I see your point. Indeed, our knowledge of the universe is 100% certain to
be incomplete.
But that by itself proves nothing about anybody else around in the Galaxy.
So this statement seems irrelevant to the subject.
>> We know very little about the probability of intelligent, technological,
>> life emerging in the Galaxy (only that that probability is not zero).
>
> A seeming quibble is my point. There is nothing with a probability of
> zero. If a thing cannot happen probability cannot be applied nor can its
> terminology. It can happen therefore it does happen and a mere billion
> years after one arises the paradox is in play. There are too many billions
> of years in our past to avoid the paradox.
Still not convinced.
If ne*fl*fi in the Drake equation is 0.0001 (as some suggest) and L
(lifetime of average technological civilization) is 100 years, then N (the
number (or probability) of current technological civilisations) in the
Galaxy is 0.01. In other words, we are the only one around today, and it
will take another 10,000 years before somebody else emerges for a brief 100
year period.
Life in space is likely much more difficult than life on the planet where
evolution created us, so the chances of anyone getting out into the far
corners of the Galaxy (even in 10 billion years) are next to nothing.
No probability is zero, but it may be so close to zero that you cannot see
the difference.
>
>> And once an intelligence invents rockets, it is still far away from
>> building sustainable, independent colonies in space. Who knows what the
>> chances are to make even that small first important step towards
>> colonisation.
>
> So it takes a million years to go from rockets to colonies. What is your
> rush? Give it ten million years. I don't see a reason to hurry it along.
> The universe will still be there when we get around to it.
>
>> Beyond that we know absolutely nothing about the probability of
>> sustaining technology and prolifirating of intelligent civilisations for
>> millions of years through the entire Galaxy. It is plausible that these
>> probabilities are so low that simply no intelligent life has made it yet.
>> Or some made it all the way through the Galaxy and dwindled after that.
>
> Again the "sustaining" issue. We have been to orbit and to the moon. We
> know it can be done.
It can be done in a 10 m^3 tin can, for no more than a week.
Building a self-sustainable colony does not even work for more than a few
months, even on our own planet (see Biosphere 2 experiment).
> The rest is in improving the methods. There is clearly no limit in
> resources. Any appeal to a probability of surviving to spread is balanced
> by the number of tries inherent in each species. It is not reasonable to
> assume a monolithic effort limited to one step at a time if just for the
> fact it is not an optimum strategy for success. Even our shot at the moon
> had two involved. Japan, China and India have since joined in a mere 40
> years. 40 thousand years would be fast enough.
You show a lot of confidence in homo sapiens. Not just for the timeframe of
getting to the stars (I think it will take more that 40k years) but also for
survival of our technology (I don't think we will sustain technology for
more that 1000 years, let alone 40k year).
Either way it is speculation, but I hope that I can make it plausible that
our survival (or technology survival) is not a slam dunk in the Galaxy.
>
>> Your point only makes sense if you believe that there is little chance
>> that intelligence can dwindle in a population and little chance in which
>> we could loose (interest in, or the ability to sustain) technology at
>> some point in the future. And we know nothing about such chances.
>
> As we have no examples of devolution decreasing intelligence is in the
> can't happen category. Populations diversify what they have. I think we
> agree humans lost their interest in improving spears and swords a long
> time ago.
>
Indeed we have no examples of evolution decreasing intelligence, but neither
do we have evidence that intelligence is ever-increasing (or sustainable).
Simply speaking : There is no proof (and very little evidence) that
intelligence is always a benefit for survival. So there is a probability
that it can go (or will go) down over time.
There have been more that 100 million species on this planet, and there may
have been some of these that were rather intelligent.
Still, they died out for one reason or another.
For example, the Troodon dinosaur was smarter than the smartest mamals at
that time. Still it disappeared.
All species come and go. The ones that come are 'smarter' than the previous,
in that they are better able to survive in the environment at that time. But
they are not necessarily more intelligent.
Average lifetime of species on this planet seems to be a few million years.
In fact, the most resilient species tend to be the simple ones. The bacteria
and other single-cell organisms.
There are many, many other reasons why our intelligence could be on it's way
down rather than up.
For example, we are fragile. Our big brains require quite a bit of energy,
requiring food every couple of days, water every day and air every few
seconds. Any planet-wide shock effect will make us die out rather fast.
Also, we are 'intelligent' but also rather stupid. We have a hard time
anticipating or even acknowedging problems that are further out than a
lifetime (many of us look less than a day ahead) and tend to rely on future
generations for long-term problems. Besides, we are impulsive, emotional and
agressive. This makes us inpredictable in crisis situations and with our
awesome technology that makes us very dangerous to ourselves as well as to
the species around us.
Point is that while we have technology, we are a danger to our own survival.
An instant stupid mistake of a few of us (or a long-term bad choice by all
of us) could set us back thousands of years. Much longer that the time that
we have had technology. That is plausible, and it could easily mean that
technology (and or intelligence) is not sustainable to the point where we
can build self-relying colonies in space.
> So would there be a loss of interest in space? There have been at least
> two studies which show the number of profitable and beneficial uses of
> space are proportional to the cost to get there with a few step functions.
> That is, it is not a gradual increase but stepwise. This is nothing new.
> It happened with cars and most obviously computers.
>
> This means we are not talking about some abstract interest in space. It
> means we are talking about improving our lives. Certainly an abstract
> interest can be lost. An interest in improving our lives is fundamental to
> us.
>
Absolutely. But "impoving our lives" is typically linked to getting more
value for less effort (at least in our global market economy).
So with such short-term reasoning, self-sustainable colonies in space would
only be built when the last square foot of surface area on this planet
becomes more expensive than the first square foor of a human-built colony in
space.
I think that by that time that resource wars will set us back so far that
there is no effort (nor resources) left over to go and live in space.
That's another plausible scenario that shows that it is not a slam-dunk that
we will make it even to the first self-relying colony.
Only if you are wrong.
Theories are models, and using them has helped us get out of the stone ages
and into the modern technological era.
We use what we have to explain what we observe.
For the Fermi paradox, there is no need to resort to supernatural or other
physics-defying theories.
Using Occam's rasor, the likely solution to the Fermi paradox is simply that
intelligence (and thus technology) in species has a limited lifetime. At
least until now, in the Galaxy....
daestrom
(posted from sci.energy)
I don't think the 'handicap' is limited to this planet. I think it is
inherent in evolving life.
The order of evolution seen here has been that body and basic form
evolves before intelligence. To evolve an intelligent species with a
different number of limbs, it would require evolving successful species
of lower intelligence with that number of limbs.
And to do that, there has to be an evolutionary advantage for this
different number of limbs. Underwater, where locomotion doesn't require
the strength to support the body weight, we find many species with
varying numbers of limbs. If the 'cost' in developing more
non-weight-supporting limbs is low compared to its evolutionary
advantage, then evolutionary pressures will favor those extra limbs.
But the evolution of intelligence underwater is limited by the
capabilities of the environment.
Octopus are considered to be intelligent, with a large number of limbs.
But the underwater environment limits what they can do with their
intelligence and limbs. They cannot use tools to build shelter or
protection (perhaps because they cannot swing two rocks together with
enough force to break off useful pieces).
So it would seem that for intelligence/technology to flourish, it must
climb up out of water onto land where it can begin manipulating its
environment. But on land the cost of developing limbs that can support
the weight of the organism or pick up and manipulate its environment is
higher. They must be stronger, require more food to maintain them, and
some form of skeleton.
So there is a 'chicken or the egg' situation. Without the intelligence
to make use of such 'manipulators', there is little pressure to develop
them. And without manipulators, there is little advantage to developing
intelligence beyond some point. So they must develop in parallel.
The initial land species invest in developing just the number of limbs
to provide locomotion. Once basic locomotion is attained, the limbs can
then become more specialized to enhance survival in the local
environment. A species that can use some of its locomotive limbs for
other purposes (trapping food, defense) has an advantage over one that
has to maintain four limbs for locomotion and one or two more for these
other purposes.
Once one or more limbs specialize enough to allow modest manipulation of
the environment (digging, prying, etc...) *then* improvements in
intelligence can provide evolutionary advantage.
After emergence of intelligence as an evolutionary advantage, developing
extra limbs/manipulators isn't ruled out (e.g. elephant's trunk, or
prehensile tails). But the development of both in the same evolutionary
branch seems to be much rarer.
daestrom
jim
Rod Speed wrote:
>
> > The reason it is not fertile today is because of
> > centuries of unsustainable agriculture practices.
>
> And that in spades. Its much more likely to be due to climate change.
Yes if land use practices turns enough land into desert it does start to
impact on the local climate. No doubt about it.
>
> > There were native people of the Amazon that practiced agriculture
> > in a way that looks like it could have been indefinitely sustainable.
>
> Pretty primitive agriculture tho. Its hardly surprising that
> hunting and gathering is sustainable quite a bit of the time.
>
I was responding to the claim that it has never been possible in the
past to have any sustainable agriculture. It is true that unsustainable
past cultures existed and that those ran into the mentioned shortages,
but they were shortages that were created by the culture and were not
inevitable shortages.
-jim
Rod Speed
> Rod Speed wrote:
>>> The reason it is not fertile today is because of
>>> centuries of unsustainable agriculture practices.
>> And that in spades. Its much more likely to be due to climate change.
> Yes if land use practices turns enough land into desert it does start
> to impact on the local climate. No doubt about it.
In fact most of the time its the reverse, very significant climate
change fucks agriculture very comprehensively indeed.
>>> There were native people of the Amazon that practiced agriculture
>>> in a way that looks like it could have been indefinitely sustainable.
>>
>> Pretty primitive agriculture tho. Its hardly surprising that
>> hunting and gathering is sustainable quite a bit of the time.
> I was responding to the claim that it has never been
> possible in the past to have any sustainable agriculture.
You're lying now. He never ever said anything even remotely resembling
anything like that. He JUST said that at any time fools could proclaim that it
wasnt going to be sustainable and it turned out that they were just plain wrong.
> It is true that unsustainable past cultures existed and that those
> ran into the mentioned shortages, but they were shortages that
> were created by the culture and were not inevitable shortages.
Wrong with climate change that had nothing to do with the agriculture.
Matt Giwer
> (posted from sci.energy)
I made the remark in passing and was not clear. Let me try again.
I assume there is a route to intelligence but that it is one of more
sequences of rare events because it is so rare. I do not know all the steps in
this sequence nor if there is any particular order. I assume that both
intelligence and at least one manipulative limb is required for a
technological society. Given our ancestry I cannot exclude a manipulative limb
from one of the requirements for developing intelligence.
The number of limbs is capricious. Consider insects of two major varieties
with six, one with eight, and miscellaneous of the centipede to millipede
persuasion. And then there are the insects that did not leave the water like
lobsters.
Continuing with our own pre-history some shallow water fish used its fins to
move on the bottom and was so dumb it didn't realize when it ran out of water.
That single progenitor of all non-insect land animals happened to have
bilateral symmetry and four fin-legs. There is nothing obvious that requires
either that symmetry nor only two pair for fish.
Sticking with bilateral simply to make the exposition easy any even number of
pairs could appear for swimming and the species that takes to shallow water
and dumb enough to leave the water would be at least one of the species that
leads to land animals. The elementary objection is the added complication of
so many legs. The response is if insects can do it anything can do it.
Then going by analogy (I don't know for bugs) there are solid body like
cockroaches and segmented like ants with six and spiders with eight. There are
innumerable examples of these insects which have a pair which is used for both
locomotion and manipulation of their environment beyond simply pulling food
towards the mouth.
For us four limbed types the adaptation of a pair for even dual use is quite
rare if we look for manipulation beyond simply pulling to the mouth and even
pulling to the mouth is not that common. Primates, pandas, koalas, joeys, and
maybe by stretching things, some bears. And the actual fraction of bipeds
which would even have a full time free set of limbs for manipulation is in
itself rare.
So if land animals started with six or eight locomotion or at least not
falling over and not needing to balance on hind legs there is no intermediate
step required to get to a free pair. This is not to say a free pair would lead
to intelligence. That is something with no necessary connection to the number
of limbs.
Consider the elephant. It has an incredibly manipulative nose. Give them our
level of intelligence and they could likely develop a technological
civilization. In all the world as we know it today or in the last few tens of
millions of years only (whatever includes elephants, mastodons, etc are
called) have anything like it. It is reasonable to assume the four + one body
type is quite rare.
Evolution of intelligence is not an objective. It is something that can
happen. One presumes there is more than one route to intelligence but not many
because of its rarity. Whatever these route might be, the more species which
can take advantage of it the more likely some species will.
Therefore more than four limbs will take away at least one requirement. That
requirement being able to use limbs to manipulate the environment without
falling over.
The fewer pre-requisites to following a route to intelligence the more likely
it should be. Therefore the more limbs the better. ;) As to how many, we have
4, 6, and 8 as the most common. One assumes there is a point where more is not
better so 10 and up is uncommon.
To argue backwards we have lobsters, crabs, crayfish and related species
where in fact specialized manipulative limbs are the norm. There are some
species which to not have manipulative limbs but they are rarity rather than
vice versa for land animals. What fraction I do not know.
Getting away from skeletal animals octopus do show some manipulative
preference for the limbs but squid have a specialized pair. That is half of
the "polypus" varieties. (Just last week I discovered polypus was the Latin
word for them used by Julian, the last pagan emperor which is apropos to
nothing.)
Therefore more than four limbs permits more species to start on one of the
paths towards actual intelligence including the likely requirement to have the
ability to manipulate objects as one of the requirements to get to our kind of
intelligence.
Up front I said I cannot exclude manipulation as part of evolving
intelligence. We can observe from our own history that the people with the
higher quality things from decoration to weapons tend to be the winners.
--
Today every child knows more about the world than all the popes and all the
Luthers and all the Calvins, They know about gravity instead of believing a
god pushes them down. Our children are infinitely wiser.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 4170
http://www.giwersworld.org/antisem/GAZA-pics/ a13
Fri Jul 31 21:50:57 EDT 2009
Rod Speed
It isnt any better now.
> I assume there is a route to intelligence but that it is one of more sequences of rare events because it is so rare.
Its much more likely to be something quite basic as
intelligence only being needed in some situations and
so natural selection doesnt select for it very often.
> I do not know all the steps in this sequence
You havent established that there is a sequence.
> nor if there is any particular order. I assume that both intelligence and at least one manipulative limb is required
> for a technological society.
Yes, but that isnt really intelligence.
> Given our ancestry I cannot exclude a manipulative limb from one of the requirements for developing intelligence.
Yes, it does seen quite likely that that at least is useful for
the evolution of intelligence, if not absolutely essential.
Its hard to substantiate the claim that its essential, because some
like dophins are quite a bit more intelligent than say guppys etc.
> The number of limbs is capricious. Consider insects of two major varieties with six, one with eight, and miscellaneous
> of the centipede to millipede persuasion.
Yes, but you dont often see more than one or two used for much manipulation.
> And then there are the insects that did not leave the water like lobsters.
> Continuing with our own pre-history some shallow water fish used its fins to move on the bottom and was so dumb it
> didn't realize when it ran out of water. That single progenitor of all non-insect land
> animals happened to have bilateral symmetry and four fin-legs. There is nothing obvious that requires either that
> symmetry
Yes, thats one of the odder aspects of evolution.
> nor only two pair for fish.
> Sticking with bilateral simply to make the exposition easy any even
> number of pairs could appear for swimming and the species that takes to shallow water and dumb enough to leave the
> water would be at least one of the species that leads to land animals. The elementary objection is the added
> complication of so many legs. The response is if insects can do it anything can do it.
Harder to explain why its so rare in the higher animals tho.
> Then going by analogy (I don't know for bugs) there are solid body
> like cockroaches and segmented like ants with six and spiders with
> eight. There are innumerable examples of these insects which have a pair which is used for both locomotion and
> manipulation of their
> environment beyond simply pulling food towards the mouth.
And not just insects either.
> For us four limbed types the adaptation of a pair for even dual use is quite rare if we look for manipulation beyond
> simply pulling to the mouth and even pulling to the mouth is not that common. Primates, pandas, koalas, joeys, and
> maybe by stretching things, some bears. And the actual fraction of bipeds which would even have a full time free set
> of limbs for manipulation is in itself rare.
Presumably because there arent that many bipedal higher animals.
Presumbly because that approach has some real downsides.
Less clearly why you dont see higher animals with 4 legs for walking
and two more limbs for dealing with the food etc. Surely stuff like
dogs and cats and close should be much more effective like that.
> So if land animals started with six or eight locomotion or at least
> not falling over and not needing to balance on hind legs there is no intermediate step required to get to a free pair.
> This is not to say a free pair would lead to intelligence. That is something with no necessary connection to the
> number of limbs.
> Consider the elephant. It has an incredibly manipulative nose. Give them our level of intelligence and they could
> likely develop a technological civilization.
Dunno, its not really suitable for the use of tools, and that may be
what saw humans end up so much more intelligent than anything
else, just tool use. There is an argument that apes and close never
did see anything like the same tool use as humans just because the
thumb system didnt evolve anything like as usefully with them.
> In all the world as we know it today or in the last few tens of millions of years only (whatever includes elephants,
> mastodons, etc are called) have anything like it. It is reasonable to assume the four + one body type is quite rare.
Not really, most obviously with birds and to a lesser
extent the much more commonly seen slightly different
approach seen with dogs and cats and close.
Clearly much less useful than our very capable hands tho.
Even claws of crabs etc are nothing like as useful for tool use etc.
> Evolution of intelligence is not an objective. It is something that can happen.
Not sure that has any real meaning.
> One presumes there is more than one route to intelligence but not many because of its rarity.
Yes, it is clear with something like dophins that it can be just tool use.
> Whatever these route might be, the more species which can take advantage of it the more likely some species will.
> Therefore more than four limbs will take away at least one requirement. That requirement being able to use limbs to
> manipulate the environment without falling over.
> The fewer pre-requisites to following a route to intelligence the
> more likely it should be. Therefore the more limbs the better. ;)
Not necessarily if 4 is enough.
> As to how many, we have 4, 6, and 8 as the most common. One assumes
> there is a point where more is not better so 10 and up is uncommon.
It is however clear that a centipede is much more viable than the
approach snakes take, no limbs at all, but snakes happened anyway.
> To argue backwards we have lobsters, crabs, crayfish and related
> species where in fact specialized manipulative limbs are the norm.
> There are some species which to not have manipulative limbs but they are rarity rather than vice versa for land
> animals.
Thats not really true. Snakes are in fact much more common
than even 6 legged land animals, let alone 8 or more.
> What fraction I do not know.
> Getting away from skeletal animals octopus do show some manipulative preference for the limbs but squid have a
> specialized pair. That is half of the "polypus" varieties. (Just last week I discovered polypus was the Latin word for
> them used by Julian, the last pagan emperor which is apropos to nothing.)
> Therefore more than four limbs permits more species to start on one of the paths towards actual intelligence including
> the likely requirement to have the ability to manipulate objects as one of the requirements to get to our kind of
> intelligence.
It may be something as basic as hardly any of the multilegged
animals made out out of the water and its just as basic as that.
> Up front I said I cannot exclude manipulation as part of evolving intelligence.
Doesnt explain dophins.
> We can observe from our own history that the people with the higher quality things from decoration to weapons tend to
> be the winners.
That might just be because the winners have more leisure for that sort of activity.
daestrom
Yes, I considered insects and sea-creatures, but rejected them. Insects
and other exoskeletons are limited in size by their very skeleton.
Limitations on physical size limit the brain size. So highly
intelligent exoskeleton animals are excluded.
Octopus, while intelligent to some degree, are limited by the media they
live in. If an octopus can't pick up two rocks and somehow use them to
change their surroundings, then any intelligence that would foster such
behavior doesn't provide any advantage. So any 'spark' of intelligence
that may come up from time to time doesn't get preferentially passed on
in its genes. AFAIK, octopus intelligence is limited to just learning
and adapting its own behavior to the environment, not controlling or
changing the environment for its own benefit (i.e. applying technology).
For a random improvement in intelligence/technology to provide an
evolutionary edge, it must be accompanied by manipulators that can
effect a change on the surroundings. Octopus are a perfect example of
what happens when the multiple limbs *cannot* change the surroundings.
Their intelligence plateaus and they don't develop any technology.
Despite their extra limbs, they are limited to seeking out natural
hiding places and moving to where the environment is more survivable.
As far as it being *random* that most land animals are quadrupeds, I
reject that hypothesis as well. Evidence is that the first
'mud-guppies' and such only developed two limbs for crawling, not four.
Quadrupeds have many advantages over two or three legged animals. The
gait of a quadruped is very stable and doesn't require fast reflexes or
an enhanced sense of balance. This makes it a 'natural' early goal for
evolution.
The speed/height of bipedal locomotion isn't an advantage when the first
species come onto land. So the most successful arrangement early on is
four-legged. Only when there are other species, either predators or
prey, does a bipedal gait have any advantage. We see this in the
evolution of the dinosaurs and again in mammals.
The cost of more limbs is small for tiny insects such as those you
cited, but the cost rises with body size. Doubling body weight means
doubling the cross-section of weight-supporting limbs, which means
cubing the weight of the limb.
Also with tiny crawling insects, multiple legs confers advantages in
crossing gaps in soil/vegetation. But as body size increases, the
advantages of more limbs diminish to the point of it just isn't worth
it. A four legged lizard can cover the same territory as a centipede,
without the need for so many legs. What evolutionary advantage would a
six or eight legged lizard have?
Bottom line is, although random mutation *could* create a species with
more limbs or an odd number of limbs, if the mutation doesn't provide a
strong evolutionary advantage, the mutation simply dies out. I believe
that over a certain body size, more than four limbs seldom provides any
advantage that outweighs the extra costs.
And to develop technology, the species has to live in an environment
that it can manipulate. While the buoyancy of the sea allows multiple
limbs to be developed with low cost (no skeleton at all in the octopus),
the high viscosity of the sea prevents developing striking/throwing skill.
daestrom
Matt Giwer
As we know it is not a matter of probability because we exist we know they
are there.
With this knowledge Fermi's false choice needs be restated as "why are they
not here YET?" And the counter question is, "why are we not there yet?" The
restatement is legitimate. Both questions are equally valid. An answer which
applies to one applies to both.
I can leave out the YET and ask, "If eagles exist why are there none on my
couch?" When we know about hideous nature of my couch the absence is easy to
explain and our knowledge of eagles is only icing on the cake.
And once we introduce what eagles do any implication of what ETs do is
clearly unknowable as we know infinitely more about the species specific
behavior of eagles. We don't know why they don't like my couch.
>> This planet is handicapped in the dominant land animals have only four
>> limbs with bilateral symmetry. That manipulating appendages are essential
>> to a technological civilization meant two legged locomotion was a
>> prerequisite. That is relatively rare. Had the dominant form been tripod
>> plus one or more than four the route to technology would not need pass
>> through the bottleneck of bipedal locomotion first.
> Apparently, on planet Earth, symmetric four limb creatures apparently took
> the upper hand at least in the more 'intelligent' forms of life. There must
> have been certain selection criteria for that, like efficiency and
> effectiveness in the environment.
If in fact there were evidence of land vertebrates or even shallow water
vertebrates with different numbers then we could make a case for selection. In
fact the candidate first land fish popular 40 years ago had six. But there is
no such evidence. Without evidence of existence we cannot hypothesize a
selection. [see my reply to daestrom] Exoskeletal forms which made it to land
as our insects were not so limited.
Further we look at the earliest fish and we see no signs of bones which could
have been associated with fins. To get those bones there must be structures
like the pelvis and the shoulder bones but where they appeared has no apparent
deterministic cause when in water nor does the number of them.
To get back to insects they developed many different numbers of limbs and no
indication of any selection for the number.
At the bottom line of all of evolution is that only diversity is random,
selection is rigorous and absolute. If only four appeared then that is the way
it was and fours competed. There is no requirement for all possible numbers of
limbs to appear.
> Still, I do no see why this has to be 'rare', or why it would have delayed
> development of intelligence and technology.
The delay is solely based upon having one less hurdle.
> It almost seems that we are optimized : If any 5-limbed species were
> 'intelligent', then they could have done with only 4 limbs, rendering the
> 5th limb obsolete (OT: using this argument, the female homo sapiens are more
> efficient than male form :o).
Perhaps I should not have introduced this as I see from daestrom and now from
you I was far from clear. I had no intent of suggesting a prehensile penis.
But there is the clitoris, the panda's penis.
As to a useful five, see the elephant. While a candidate for unrecognized
intelligence its prehensile 5th is often the means of demonstrating its
candidacy.
>>> Either way, sustainability has to be crucial : At the very least, a
>>> civilisation that expands through the Galaxy MUST sustain technology.
>> At any time in human history an argument could have been made that the
>> technology of the time was unsustainable. Sustainability is a null
>> argument. That is basically what I don't like about it. The bronze age was
>> not sustainable for the shortage of tin. Farming was not sustainable for
>> the shortage of good bottom land near rivers. Cattle are unsustainable for
>> the shortage of pastureland.
>> The good news is war is forever limited as the amount of bronze available
>> limits the number of cannon that can be made. Ballista will always be
>> limited weapons as there is so little lead to use in place of stones. The
>> population density of cities is forever limited by the inability to
>> dispose of the horse manure from the number of horses needed.
>> Where will we ever get enough cattle for the tallow for candles? Then
>> there are whale oil lamps. The limited distance of the telegraph because
>> of the resistance of iron wires.
>> And of course now oil. The average recovery from a well is about 25%. If
>> that can be increased to to 40% the proven reserves will double but as no
>> further improvement is possible our's is not sustainable.
> All good points, but that was not the issue that I brought up.
> The issue is that it is NOT certain that technology is something that will
> be around forever now that we reached it.
As with sustainability the definition of technology evolves. Obviously there
will always be stone age technology.
> Technology requires intelligence, and intelligence is not a sure thing in
> evolution. See below for some plausible explanations of this point.
So is the question of a particular level of technology? How about Rome
against the Dark Ages? Sanitation technology took a dive but architecture
produced some of the most impressive cathedrals even in comparison to those
produced today. Then there is music. We know the music of the Dark Ages
because they invented musical notation. We do not know of any prior music for
the lack of notation. To make matters worse the entire art and science of
pyramid construction was lost some 4400 years ago. We still have no idea how
they did it and the Eiffel Tower was first thing higher than them and iron
seems like cheating.
So I have no idea what is to be defined as maintaining technology.
As for intelligence, of course it is not certain considering how long it took
to appear here. It is purely chance. It is almost certainly a sequence of rare
steps because of it taking this long for us to think about it. And even we
spent 90,000 years doing nothing interesting with intelligence. That is not
long but wholly inexplicable.
But evolution is chance as is encountering all the favorable steps which will
lead to the very rare circumstance where intelligence in itself is a dominant
factor in survival.
>>>> There has to be something fundamentally wrong with our understanding of
>>>> the universe. As we are dealing with a sample size of one that is not so
>>>> much a speculation as a certainty.
>>> There does not need to be anything wrong with our fundamental
>>> understanding of the universe at all.
>> But we can be 100% certain that there is much wrong with our understanding
>> of the universe. A century ago there were no galaxies. Four decades ago
>> there were Little Green Man with their beacons. Ten years ago there was
>> neither dark matter nor dark energy.
> I see your point. Indeed, our knowledge of the universe is 100% certain to
> be incomplete.
> But that by itself proves nothing about anybody else around in the Galaxy.
> So this statement seems irrelevant to the subject.
We agree that our knowledge of the physical universe is necessarily very
wrong for no fault of our own. I point out that it is wrong yet we are in fact
viewing the entire universe and at least have a basis for saying what we do.
We know nothing about ET beyond the surmises from evolution that we conclude
from our observations. Now if we could observe ET for a while we might have
something to say that is of interest.
>>> We know very little about the probability of intelligent, technological,
>>> life emerging in the Galaxy (only that that probability is not zero).
>> A seeming quibble is my point. There is nothing with a probability of
>> zero. If a thing cannot happen probability cannot be applied nor can its
>> terminology. It can happen therefore it does happen and a mere billion
>> years after one arises the paradox is in play. There are too many billions
>> of years in our past to avoid the paradox.
> Still not convinced.
The last thing I want to do is convince you. I would much appreciate it you
would identify my errors but in doing so present a superior exposition of the
same idea.
> If ne*fl*fi in the Drake equation is 0.0001 (as some suggest) and L
> (lifetime of average technological civilization) is 100 years, then N (the
> number (or probability) of current technological civilisations) in the
> Galaxy is 0.01. In other words, we are the only one around today, and it
> will take another 10,000 years before somebody else emerges for a brief 100
> year period.
As I have see no credible argument for any time limitation I really have
nothing to say. If you wish to present a particular argument I will point to
impossibility of sustainable farming given that starting it causes family size
to increase and there is a finite amount of good bottomland. In fact I was
making just that argument in a past life when some asshole invented the plow.
In a later life I argued the limitations of the plow until another asshole
stopped pulling it himself and hitched it to an ox.
After that I swore off negative predictions.
> Life in space is likely much more difficult than life on the planet where
> evolution created us, so the chances of anyone getting out into the far
> corners of the Galaxy (even in 10 billion years) are next to nothing.
> No probability is zero, but it may be so close to zero that you cannot see
> the difference.
By the time any of our descendants reach said far corners they will be one of
several species into which we diversified or engineered, more likely the latter.
But if the issue is only difficulty it is certain there is no way to colonize
the new world for that great difficulty. Life is space is certainly going to
be harder than on earth. Life at sea is certainly harder than on land yet
there are millions of fools who buy holes in the water to pour their money into.
But lets not be so modern. Lets look at the extreme difficulty of living
outside of Africa and the danger of having to deal with the fire demon. We
might even find that the only way to survive with fire is to lose our fur.
But if you want to look at this seriously the technical specs for eliminating
most of the difficulties of living in space were established by SF writers by
1970 and the only new one since then is bone decalcification but muscle
weakness was predicted and centrifugal force was identified as a solution.
If I take travel on water as a comparison, our present ventures into space
are at the level of hanging onto a log with the raft and the canoe and the
boat still in the far future. And the far future of people hanging onto a log
is an oil tanker only 100,000 years in their future.
I see no reason to be so pessimistic.
Nor do I think this constitutes pollyanna optimism. I am an old fart. When I
was just a lad (I have waited to long to say that) getting into space at all
was ridiculed. And my reading all the SF crap about it was looked down upon.
In only a part of my lifetime the technology progressed first to getting to
orbit and then to the moon and now working out the details of getting to Mars
with a permanent station on the moon.
While the world was being "wowed" by Sputnik and Apollo 11, I was in the "why
so slow?" camp. I figured out why it was so slow when I was 20 after three
years of physics course work and finally grasping the enormity of the
organization of the effort.
So tell me, what is the basis for your pessimism?
>>> And once an intelligence invents rockets, it is still far away from
>>> building sustainable, independent colonies in space. Who knows what the
>>> chances are to make even that small first important step towards
>>> colonisation.
>> So it takes a million years to go from rockets to colonies. What is your
>> rush? Give it ten million years. I don't see a reason to hurry it along.
>> The universe will still be there when we get around to it.
>>> Beyond that we know absolutely nothing about the probability of
>>> sustaining technology and prolifirating of intelligent civilisations for
>>> millions of years through the entire Galaxy. It is plausible that these
>>> probabilities are so low that simply no intelligent life has made it yet.
>>> Or some made it all the way through the Galaxy and dwindled after that.
>> Again the "sustaining" issue. We have been to orbit and to the moon. We
>> know it can be done.
> It can be done in a 10 m^3 tin can, for no more than a week.
> Building a self-sustainable colony does not even work for more than a few
> months, even on our own planet (see Biosphere 2 experiment).
From where comes your assumption that the results of Bio 2 can never lead to
a 3 or 4 or 9 which does work?
>> The rest is in improving the methods. There is clearly no limit in
>> resources. Any appeal to a probability of surviving to spread is balanced
>> by the number of tries inherent in each species. It is not reasonable to
>> assume a monolithic effort limited to one step at a time if just for the
>> fact it is not an optimum strategy for success. Even our shot at the moon
>> had two involved. Japan, China and India have since joined in a mere 40
>> years. 40 thousand years would be fast enough.
> You show a lot of confidence in homo sapiens.
The primate group is some 400,000 years old and HSS is at least 100,000
although some have put it at 140,000. At the present rate of progress and we
merely survive as long as we have survived our technology will be
inconceivable to us in a mere five centuries.
> Not just for the timeframe of
> getting to the stars (I think it will take more that 40k years) but also for
> survival of our technology (I don't think we will sustain technology for
> more that 1000 years, let alone 40k year).
I agree were were not able to sustain our flint napping technology. It is no
wonder we have lost so many of our people to the leopards.
The one certain thing is that our technology a century from now will not be
founded upon much of anything that it is today. As to a thousand years from
now consider it magic.
> Either way it is speculation, but I hope that I can make it plausible that
> our survival (or technology survival) is not a slam dunk in the Galaxy.
Our survival is certain as long as follow-on species from us are not
excluded. I assume only that intelligence not be trumped by some
non-intelligence feature. I assume that because nothing evolves fully
implemented and with intelligence we will see what is going on and we will
kill it.
>>> Your point only makes sense if you believe that there is little chance
>>> that intelligence can dwindle in a population and little chance in which
>>> we could loose (interest in, or the ability to sustain) technology at
>>> some point in the future. And we know nothing about such chances.
>> As we have no examples of devolution decreasing intelligence is in the
>> can't happen category. Populations diversify what they have. I think we
>> agree humans lost their interest in improving spears and swords a long
>> time ago.
> Indeed we have no examples of evolution decreasing intelligence, but neither
> do we have evidence that intelligence is ever-increasing (or sustainable).
Are you aware IQ tests have to be recalibrated every ten years because the
mean drifts upwards? This applies to all tests not just to those which are
administered in schools.
Now that may sound impossible but IQ tests include a time factor. So our
parents came to the same correct conclusions it simply took longer. Given the
standard deviation, simply doubling or tripling the test time would allow most
people to max out the test.
> Simply speaking : There is no proof (and very little evidence) that
> intelligence is always a benefit for survival. So there is a probability
> that it can go (or will go) down over time.
Yes it IS a benefit because we are here. Also we know that claws and teeth
and other things are also benefits. Because of the rarity of intelligence we
know it is an uncommon development over claws and teeth. Simply having a
reasonable proclivity to use things as tools as do many species and having
just enough smarts to use a piece of tree branch as a club and carrying it at
all times may have been all that was needed to avoid going the well
established evolutionary paths of teeth, claws and size for survival. At that
point it is 2001 all over again with better survival chances going to those
smart enough to make better weapons including against each other. Pure
speculation of course.
It is not possible for IQ to go down for there are no examples of devolution.
Nothing with survival value goes away unless replaced by something of greater
value.
For the record, because arriving at intelligence was a random process, it
cannot be repeated in reverse as there is no order in statistics such that
reversal is possible. The drunk can get back where he started but not by
retracing his steps.
> There have been more that 100 million species on this planet, and there may
> have been some of these that were rather intelligent.
Which is even greater speculation than about dolphins and elephants.
> Still, they died out for one reason or another.
The one thing that marks them all is that they were greenie treehuggers. They
did not change their environment in a manner which left traces.
> For example, the Troodon dinosaur was smarter than the smartest mamals at
> that time. Still it disappeared.
Smart mammals used telekinesis to move that meteor to a collision course.
> All species come and go. The ones that come are 'smarter' than the previous,
> in that they are better able to survive in the environment at that time. But
> they are not necessarily more intelligent.
It should be obvious that in the wild claws and teeth rule. It took
intelligence to have a fighting chance against tooth and claw and to avoid
developing them instead of intelligence.
> Average lifetime of species on this planet seems to be a few million years.
With a few million years we have plenty of time to get to other planets and
reset the clock.
> In fact, the most resilient species tend to be the simple ones. The bacteria
> and other single-cell organisms.
Which brings up the quite obvious point that mutation is a function of
generations not of time. Twice an hour is like 30 years for us.
> There are many, many other reasons why our intelligence could be on it's way
> down rather than up.
> For example, we are fragile. Our big brains require quite a bit of energy,
> requiring food every couple of days, water every day and air every few
> seconds. Any planet-wide shock effect will make us die out rather fast.
If that is a reason then we should have been worrying before the obesity
epidemic struck. As to a planet-wide shock we know of perhaps two of them.
They were hundreds of millions of years apart. Not the sort of thing to lose
sleep over unless you are Adrian Monk.
> Also, we are 'intelligent' but also rather stupid. We have a hard time
> anticipating or even acknowedging problems that are further out than a
> lifetime (many of us look less than a day ahead) and tend to rely on future
> generations for long-term problems. Besides, we are impulsive, emotional and
> agressive. This makes us inpredictable in crisis situations and with our
> awesome technology that makes us very dangerous to ourselves as well as to
> the species around us.
Whatever we are just our own HSS have survived not only the largest predators
on the planet with no more than stone axes but also our nearest relatives.
Whatever the value of being predictable in a crisis we have survived as we
are. As to considering things beyond our lifetimes so far as we know we are
the only species that considers anything beyond the present moment and all the
other species have survived quite well. You take characteristics and portray
them as a problem even though they have never been a problem. If you can learn
to spin a good yarn you can write science fiction but this is not the
substance of serious discussion.
> Point is that while we have technology, we are a danger to our own survival.
> An instant stupid mistake of a few of us (or a long-term bad choice by all
> of us) could set us back thousands of years. Much longer that the time that
> we have had technology. That is plausible, and it could easily mean that
> technology (and or intelligence) is not sustainable to the point where we
> can build self-relying colonies in space.
Even though implausible the only credible "danger to survival" by our own
technology ever presented was nuclear war on the US/Russia scale. In practice
only the targeted countries would have been set back. That is hardly all of
us. China even speculated on its population reduction benefits.
>> So would there be a loss of interest in space? There have been at least
>> two studies which show the number of profitable and beneficial uses of
>> space are proportional to the cost to get there with a few step functions.
>> That is, it is not a gradual increase but stepwise. This is nothing new.
>> It happened with cars and most obviously computers.
>> This means we are not talking about some abstract interest in space. It
>> means we are talking about improving our lives. Certainly an abstract
>> interest can be lost. An interest in improving our lives is fundamental to
>> us.
> Absolutely. But "impoving our lives" is typically linked to getting more
> value for less effort (at least in our global market economy).
Satellites for weather, communication, navigation are things simply
unavailable any other way or at a hugely greater cost.
> So with such short-term reasoning, self-sustainable colonies in space would
> only be built when the last square foot of surface area on this planet
> becomes more expensive than the first square foor of a human-built colony in
> space.
Sustainable colonies will always be an exercise as with research stations in
Antarctica. People will be there full time when it is profitable to do so.
Space tourism is the obvious. The hotel staff will be the full timers living
in space.
> I think that by that time that resource wars will set us back so far that
> there is no effort (nor resources) left over to go and live in space.
> That's another plausible scenario that shows that it is not a slam-dunk that
> we will make it even to the first self-relying colony.
And space tourism starts with just short hops into space next year. Hotel
designs are being considered at the moment. Civilian surface to LEO is
considered the next step.
Do you follow the news at all?
Agreed but what I am suspect has not been observed. So all I can do is make
predictions of what will be observed. It also requires a god particle whose
characteristics change between states depending upon their local density. In
at least one of these states they repel. They sort of change flavors and
exhibit flocking behavior while preventing them all from joining into a single
flock. Dark energy is then simply the interaction of dark matter when it is
not in its "Higgs boson state" for lack of a better term.
> For the Fermi paradox, there is no need to resort to supernatural or other
> physics-defying theories.
> Using Occam's rasor, the likely solution to the Fermi paradox is simply that
> intelligence (and thus technology) in species has a limited lifetime. At
> least until now, in the Galaxy....
This did get me off my duff to write up my opinion of the paradox.
http://www.giwersworld.org/UFO/eagle-couch.phtml
The Eagle on my Couch
Fermi's Paradox revisited
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http://www.giwersworld.org/palestine/answers.phtml a9
Fri Jul 31 23:17:03 EDT 2009
Matt Giwer
But more limbs for the same body mass means they can be smaller and move
faster for running.
> Also with tiny crawling insects, multiple legs confers advantages in
> crossing gaps in soil/vegetation. But as body size increases, the
> advantages of more limbs diminish to the point of it just isn't worth
> it. A four legged lizard can cover the same territory as a centipede,
> without the need for so many legs. What evolutionary advantage would a
> six or eight legged lizard have?
>
> Bottom line is, although random mutation *could* create a species with
> more limbs or an odd number of limbs, if the mutation doesn't provide a
> strong evolutionary advantage, the mutation simply dies out. I believe
> that over a certain body size, more than four limbs seldom provides any
> advantage that outweighs the extra costs.
>
> And to develop technology, the species has to live in an environment
> that it can manipulate. While the buoyancy of the sea allows multiple
> limbs to be developed with low cost (no skeleton at all in the octopus),
> the high viscosity of the sea prevents developing striking/throwing skill.
Let me digress upon the number of limbs for non-insect land animals. So far
as I can find the candidates were sort of "lungfishes" with only four
appendages for locomotion. That is how they arrived on land. So far there is
no evidence of any other species with a different number moving onto land
leading to a survival conflict. So the number of limbs we see is based solely
upon the number we started with a few hundred million years ago. The option of
evolving more legs is not a given any more than only Panda's have a fake
thumb. It happened to them.
What I suggest is simply that the first lungfish on some other planet might
have had six or eight or some other number. If no species with a different
number ever moved to land then all their descendants would have the same
number as the original. While losing limbs is a known possibility as in snakes
there is no known case of additional limbs.
If for example we should establish the first lungfish had six and after that
fossils started showing a pair of them becoming vestigial and finally
disappearing there could be a case for four being better than six or more.
However the fossil record does not show any loss of limbs. It does show the
occasional adaption of the forward pair to walking plus another use or to
another use exclusively as in wings or at times approaching vestigial as in T.
Rex where they appear to have no utility at all being too short to even bring
food to the mouth.
With this in mind I constructed the discussion above.
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Sat Aug 1 21:56:38 EDT 2009
Matt Giwer
>
> Matt Giwer wrote:
>
>> At any time in human history an argument could have been made that the
>> technology of the time was unsustainable. Sustainability is a null argument.
>> That is basically what I don't like about it. The bronze age was not
>> sustainable for the shortage of tin. Farming was not sustainable for the
>> shortage of good bottom land near rivers. Cattle are unsustainable for the
>> shortage of pastureland.
>
> Except that is not based on fact but on what you wish to be true.
>
> We know that in the past Iraq had ample rich farm land and plenty of
> pasture land. more than enough for the needs of the population at the
> time. It used to be as rich as the deep fertile soils of the upper
> midwest U.S.A. The reason it is not fertile today is because of
> centuries of unsustainable agriculture practices.
Which is the obvious explanation for the drastic decrease in crop production
in the upper midwest as compared to a century ago.
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Sun Aug 2 21:09:17 EDT 2009
Rod Speed
> jim wrote
>> Matt Giwer wrote
>>> At any time in human history an argument could have been
>>> made that the technology of the time was unsustainable.
>>> Sustainability is a null argument. That is basically what I don't
>>> like about it. The bronze age was not sustainable for the shortage
>>> of tin. Farming was not sustainable for the shortage of good bottom
>>> land near rivers. Cattle are unsustainable for the shortage of pastureland.
>> Except that is not based on fact but on what you wish to be true.
>> We know that in the past Iraq had ample rich farm land and plenty of
>> pasture land. more than enough for the needs of the population at the
>> time. It used to be as rich as the deep fertile soils of the upper
>> midwest U.S.A. The reason it is not fertile today is because of
>> centuries of unsustainable agriculture practices.
>
> Which is the obvious explanation for the drastic decrease in crop
> production in the upper midwest as compared to a century ago.
That hasnt happened, pure myth.
Maybe you are being sarcastic.
Matt Giwer
Ya reckon?
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Mon Aug 3 00:34:27 EDT 2009