322 comments on DrumBeat: October 11, 2006
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322 comments on DrumBeat: October 11, 2006
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I like these kinds of articles because they show in a tangible way how everyone can be affected in our economic food chain. Most people I know in my 3D World shrug off Peak Oil because they do not understand how it might affect them - other than the pump prices.
Here you can see how the cost of energy creeps into every corner of the economy (pizza delivery costs... yard care, etc).
If this is a localized result of that very adjustment which is so often denied, that may not be a bad thing.
On the other hand, if someone can show that there are no winners (nationally or even internationally) to balance the losers, then maybe we are in a broad downward movement.
I do think it is very bad, and is an indication that we should change our national policies ... but isn't that more a story of globalization and misapplied tax cuts?
The final frontier.
These are the voyages of the venture ship: Enterprise.
To boldly go where no business has gone before.
To seek our new sources of profit.
To suck out the last of what is worth sucking on.
And then ... to move on.
(Resistance is futile.)
I used to think Star Trek technology would save us. Heck, that's why I became an engineer. I wanted to be part of the solution. Instead, I ended up part of the problem. :-/
Kidding aside, after I wrote that, it dawned on me that the Cornucopians in our society are like Captain Kirk.
Sure the dylithium crystals are almost drained dry. But Scottie the ingenius engineer will pull another rabbit out of the hat and keep us going for at least one more episode.
Sure the oil wells are being drained dry, but our real world engineers will pull another Moore's Law miracle and double production figures yet again. They'll go the extra mile undersea. They'll trudge the extra step out into the tundra.
Even if the Cornucopians are right, you have to ask if their plan is wise? IS that what we should be doing? Squeezing the last drop out of her (Planet Earth) BEFORE we figure out how to get along without the dylithium energy?
What we have yet to figure out is that Star Trek had a good run, but in the end, after all it's "generations", it got cancelled.
Yup. They don't believe in the no-win scenario.
Two words: Kobayashi Maru
Book Description
A freak shuttlecraft accident -- and suddenly Captain Kirk and most of his senior officers find themselves adrift in space, with no hope of rescue, no hope of repairing their craft, or restoring communications -- with nothing, in short but time on their hands.
Time enough for each to tell the story of the Kobayashi Maru -- the Starfleet Academy test given to command cadets. Nominally a tactical exercise, the Kobayashi Maru is in fact a test of character revealed in the choices each man makes -- and does not make.
Discover now how Starfleet Cadets Kirk, Chekov, Scotty, and Sulu each faced the Kobayashi Maru...and became in turn Starfleet officers.
Download Description
As portrayed in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, all Starfleet Command cadets must take the "no-win" Kobayashi Maru rescue simulation. Trapped aboard a doomed shuttlecraft, the Enterprise officers reminisce about their individual performances on the Kobayashi Maru test . . . reminiscences that spark a last, desperate attempt at survival.
Alan
Think 3-dimensionally Scottie!
Give me all the impulse shopping power you got.
Aye aye Captain.
Today, any cadet who did what Kirk did, tampering with school computers, would be expelled.
The Kobayashi Maru was meant to teach cadets that sometimes, no matter what you do, you lose. Kirk cheated...and hence never learned that lesson.
BTW, it was actually the TOS movies (ST II, I think) that introduced the no-win scenario and the Kobayashi Maru.
I am at this very moment re-programming the laws of thermodynamics and geo-global climatology. Wish me luck.
Get back here Scottie, you haven't finished the last line of code! The gin bottle is yours AFTER you finish.
Star Trek is more about avoiding reality than anything else - and yes, what a metaphor for America.
So the winners get more and more, the losers less and less. Median income stagnant or down. If the winners played the game smart they would create prosperity for all.
But it's not about prosperity, it's not about creating wealth. It's about being a winner and giving the losers a hot poker in the ass.
In years past, "wealth" was measured by the number of acres of fertile land that a noble owned and the number of sheep, cattle and servants he had working that land for him and directing the profitable "fat of the land" to him in terms of goods, services and taxes.
During the industrial revolution, the definition changed somewhat from defining territory in terms of land and serfs to maket size and market share. This was more of a Demand-side oriented view of the world. You became "wealthier" as more of the world demanded your goods or services, as your sphere of influence as a seller enlarged.
Modern wealth (IMHO) has two intertwined aspects:
Neuro-hegemony over:
- Sources of money inflow, and
- Sources of quality service provision.
First, what do I mean by "neuro-hegemony"?In days of old (yes, when knights were bold), a nobleman exerted his hegemony mostly by physical force, by running a tight police state. That was a costly and resource intensive way of controlling an empire. Besides as you got older and weaker, some younger punk warlord can come in, beat you up and take over.
The church was a first vehicle for gaining control. Give onto Ceasar ... yeah, right. Who do you think actually came up with that line, Jesus or Ceasar?
But as control by the church began to slip, nobility realized there was a much subtler way to maintain control: Education. Get hold of the kids while they were young and program their brains with ideas that will fool them into serving you. Fool their parents into thinking that "education" is good for everybody. Fool them into fighting over each other so they can get into the "best" of schools and thereby become the "best" of people, the ivory towers of their society. Yeah right. (Oops sorry. Not supposed to say that. It's heresy you know.)
As a nobleperson, you want to fool as many people as possible into serving you. That means you have to "educate" a greater number of them to your way of how they should think. They should worship Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand. They should believe that working long hours and even weekends in the office, will get them to the promised land. Death by over work is an honorable way to go, and it serves as a good example for the other sheeple.
That is what "globilization" is really about: finding larger masses of population to service the masters. Of course, when you finish encircling the globe, that indeed is the final frontier. The race is on to see who finishes first.
There are two basic ways that the masses can serve you, the nobleperson: (1) sending you more money in the form of taxes or in the form of revenue from having bought some trinkets you "sell" to them; and (2) providing you with immediate and quality service the instant you want it. When you go to a restaurant, the waiter is there at the mere whip of a finger. More champagne sir? What can I get you? When you go to a hospital, you get the executive suite and the best of doctors fighting over each other to see who can service you first. That is wealth. That is power. That is neural hegemony.
As the smallest addendum, do not discount the sheer glee our modern nobles find in causing pain. It is fun to kick out your servants teeth and hear him thank you for it.
They don't just profit from their servants, they hate us.
You are loved.
Here is why.
The modern nobles love their assests.
They love their cattle.
They love their sheep.
And aye, even thou be a pain in the assets, they love you.
odo -I too think calling it catabolic collapse is overreaching a bit, but this is more than just a general historical decline; I think it is a foretelling of what's to come.
What is productive about Youtube? It's not a wealth-generating enterprise like the auto industry, in which you take raw materials like iron ore and oil and turn them into vehicles that do work. The U.S. continues to move away from real value-added industry towards infotainment/service industries. Who was it that said we Americans are just living off of each other's "discretionary" income?
Youtube is a way to share videos of people doing stuff (don't get me wrong, I enjoy it), and it is a front for ads telling us we need more worthless junk. These ads generate an income for not that many people in comparison to the auto industry.
Bottom line, the auto industry creates real wealth, while Youtube doesn't. And how is it anyway that the acquisition of Youtube by Google is a sign of economic hope? Isn't it just a monopolizing of the infotainment industry? It certainly doesn't offset the decline of the auto industry.
Tom Anderson-Brown
I think stegasourus are my favorite ;-).
Consider for at least a full minute: what happens when oil prices go up, and bandwidth prices go down?
So I guess anytime a data-sharing giant like google buys a niche online service like Youtube, we should all feel like our country's industrial health is A-OK.
Diminishing returns, in my opinion. The internet is great, but my argument remains that it doesn't replace the wealth generation of something like the auto industry.
And perhaps I am a dinosaur (pretty good for a 29 year-old). I'd rather see our population learning skills that contribute wealth to our society like welding, masonry, engineering, geology, medicine, agriculture. It probably says something about my experiences, but I believe these productive occupations are the foundation of a healthy economy, and that this foundation supports the bits and bytes of the internet. Would the internet, or computers, have been realized were it not for these industries? The reason the computer (or even math) was developed was to make these "hard" industries more efficient. But, like I said, we're experiencing diminishing returns. We're (well you're) now calling Youtube "Productive". I use Youtube for procrastinating.
Tom A-B
That is the symmetry I was striving for in the random question.
Now I am amused to see people demand of me that I prove youtube is typical, and may be generalized ... while totally not getting that we started with a similar point case, and broad generalizations.
It is a mess. Welcome to the mess. Some heavy oil-consuming industries will die. Some ethereal information companies will prosper.
I, the moderate, uncommitted to a single future, sure don't know how that will play out.
Odo,
They don't get it.
The fact of the matter is it may very well become a wealth generating enterprise. The business model of the internet is very much like TV. You generate content, which generates web page views, and you sell ads.
YouTube is the biggest in a new "user generated video content" type web portal. There are some questions about copyright. Google is going to try and find answers for them. If they can conquer the issues with their video fingerprinting technology and then combine that with their superior ad services, this is going to be a slam dunk.
This whole attitude that only welders, mechanics, and geologists produce things is such crap. Talk about a totally bogus Pat Larouche type argument. The internet is huge. It's an entirely new paradigm. And it is possible to make a lot of money on it. And just because you can't pick it up, doesn't make it any less real.
Money is not wealth.
This site is here because it's obvious that the energy surplus is fading fast. The levels of complexity in our society, of which YouTube is the latest added layer, will vanish accordingly, as will the invented prosperity that this delusional society leans on. You've been had!
Just below this post you will find this list:
Programmers,
Accountants,
Database Administrators,
Network Administrators,
Human Resources,
Technical Support,
Customer Service Reps,
Billing specialists,
Phone Operator,
Salesmen
See that? All about to disappear. See also Leanan's post about real skills (which equal real wealth).
In fact quite often those who did have the skills needed to produce physical wealth were often owned themselves by the nobles/administrators, or else were so dependent on their patrons that to go against the Administrators would mean death in one fashion or another.
In the end you could say the skills to Administrate and the companion skills such as policing, and combat trump skills of physical labor.
Your statement that all those IT jobs are about to disappear is built on the assumption that collapse has to be severe enough to return us to a society of equivilent technology to 200 years ago or worse. That is a pretty severe assumption and one that I think is wrong.
You've also taken that list of jobs out of context from the original point of the post, much as did Leanan in that I was not talking about a collapsed society, I was talking about a society still functioning but taking measures to slow or prevent collapse.
Granted if we tank, a lot of those positions will be needed in much smaller numbers. But first we have to tank, and we have not done so yet.
In the meantime the concept of Virtual Property, is one that is growing, and one that I think would be important to a community worried about resource degradation and consumption. If we spend our money (which essentially is a representation of our time spent working) consuming, or "owning" virtual property (a bunch of electrons arranged in some order) wouldn't that allow the consumption of physical resources to slow?
Instead of buying that jet ski which was produced using fiber glass, and steel and plastic and who knows how much energy to make those materials, I buy instead an equivilent dollars worth of videos, video games, or e-books, who is saving more resources? Or if I decide to watch the football game on my telivision instead of driving downtown or heck flying to the away games, who is saving more resources?
People will want "things". Its part of our nature. Riches, wealth, whatever you want to call it has been a part of every major civilization around the world. The difference in those civilizations, and the measure of wealth has been related to what it is they value(gold, food, land, women, soldiers) . Moving into a resource strained era, I could easily see Virtual Property becoming the new "wealth" for people. Instead of the big fancy car, or big house, it may be the one with the largest collection of MP3s. Or the one who has built a virtual empire in some game world. Or the one who has a blog with the most hits. I think any of those would be more desirable to a world trying to save physical resources, and if those are to exist you will need that list of jobs to be around.
I agree that Americans can never compete with poorer country's workers in gluing shoe bottoms together, answering questions on the phone, and and increasingly wide range of other tasks that tend towards the lower end of the value chain. I also agree that location matters less than ever.
However, there are plenty of well paid expats in China.
Americans (and Europeans, Japanese, etc) will have to cope with a scenario in which geography no longer protects low value activities. In part this is a tragedy for poor and underskilled Americans. In part it is justice for workers in poor countries.
I do think that Americans who are not able to develop skills that can't be displaced (masonry, plumbing) or which earn a high return on international markets, will suffer. It is an isolated problem for thiose individuals, although there are many of them.
Foreigners have flocked to US universities to gain access to the skill building resources in the US because they know they need them to compete. The challenge facing the US is to get these skills to a larger portion of the population.
The US as a country probably will have to cope with a lower absolute standard of living and certainly with a lower relative standard of living, but I don't see it as an injustice or the end of the world.
You can see why such a statement doesn't work well politically, though I think it would be hard to argue the facts - very poor people in places like China becoming less poor, while people in America who are well off (essentially, everyone in America by standards in places like Africa, India, China, etc.) become less well off.
What is left off the list is the environmental damage which comes with this exchange. I remember being told in the 1980/90s, that all the leather tanned for the West was done in South Korea (and at least for the motorcyle leather I looked at afterwards, it seemed true), since the metals used (chromium at the top) were simply not possible to deal with in terms of environmental rules. In other words, a lot of South Koreans got jobs, a lot of Westerners were spared trashing their rivers, and the South Koreans who will deal with such heavy metal pollution were not involved in this process at all.
Somehow, the deal seems less fair when put that way. China has a giant 'recycling' industry - nothing like melting PC components over an open fire as a way to improve your standard of living. Of course, nothing like destroying yourself by melting PC components over an open flame either, but at least the PC industry has met its obligations to be environmentally responsible. And I am pretty sure that some of the people involved in that business earn very good wages - though they live very far away from where the work is done. After all, such well paid people are educated enough and skilled enough to know what that sort of work does to a human being. But earning a wage is a human right, and it is nice to see such well paid administrators willing to give the poor such a step up out of the futility of living as a substinence farmer.
As I said, I actually pretty much agree with your points, but the picture is a touch broader than merely wages, or a few billion people getting a slightly larger slice of what the West takes for granted, like electricity, clean water, hospitals, schools.
There are costs involved which have nothing to do with the relative decline in America's standard of living.
I certainly agree that a large portion of moving economic activity to poorer countries is regulatory arbitrage. The environmental issue you discuss above is an indisputable case. Thailand had the same issue with tanneries and printing. Chemicals that couldn't be used in developed were used here, so the business moved here. Likewise, a huge portion of workers are subject to standards that workers in developing countries would not abide, either because laws protect them or because they have better options elsewhere.
And in the "better options" lies part of the crux of what makes the issue complex. Three Korean companies that manufacture bras for US companies shut down in Thailand last week. Korean textile companies are probably typical sweatshops where workers are treated at standards far below that of the West, or even Western companies in Thailand.
But rather than celebrate their "liberation" from slavelike conditions, the workers protested at the American Embassy to get their jobs back. This is because their next option is worse.
Most of the self-righteous commenters who claim that third world workers are slaves in sweatshops fail to realize (or admit) that they are there voluntarily. They made the choice because their next best option is worse. It could be prostitution, farm work which they regard as worse, or not being able to feed their children. A lot of people in developing countries do work that is a lot worse than being in a factory.
Call center workers or computer programmers appear to be a clearer case. They don't seem to work in conditions that are much worse than their American counterparts and the gain from relocation doesn't have much to do with environmental impact or worker rights. Speaking as an expat (I mean me in this case), I don't know where to put my loyalties. I feel sorry for the Americans who did nothing wrong and don't have a job. I feel good for the Indians who live in, let's face it, a desparately poor coyuntry and deserve to get out of poverty as much or more than we do.
We can leave the issue of why a large Thai company has hired me to sit with a bunch of Thais doing the same job as they are and paying all of us quite a lot of money for another day.
No, not impossible. Merely temporary.
Globalization has broken down the link between location and work, but it doesn't mean that people are all in a race to the bottom. It just realigns the values of skills.
Developing countries may have huge populations of capable people who can provide a lot of functions that the global economy values. But this also means their economies are growing and they have their own needs for other skills.
Why not?
As energy grows dearer, companies will be squeezed for more "productivity." More work done by fewer people for less money.
Like you, I am not saying it is good, just the way it will be.
Still, equating business administrators with nobility and landownership is real funny (but no more than that). I'd almost guess I can guess what your job is. Trying to save it? Only normal.
For most of our species' sedentary history, the vast majority of people who had land to work on and the skills to do the work were independent from nobility and other profiteers. Our history books may not find that noteworthy, but then again, those books are just a variant on stories about Brad Pitt.
Paris Hilton or Helen of Troy, same old, same old. Sequels to Greek mythology, which were sequels to.... The need of the human mind for religion.
The lives of "normal" people are not newsworthy, precisely because they are the vast majority.
Virtual Property is like an alcoholic who needs booze for breakfast to feel alive. It only has value in a Virtual Economy. Real enough for the addict, but a drain on the world around him.
If you don't understand that that wealth is not real, maybe it's easier to see that the food is not. You want money to buy food, but only as long as there is food, and those who have it are willing to trade it for paper. If you're hungry enough, even pieces of gold lose their value real quickly.
Can I have your Picasso since its not real wealth ?
Wealth means you own something people value.
Money is used to claim ownership of wealth.
It has nothing to do with atoms.
What do you own when you buy a house ?
The atoms or an electronic entry some where ?
Consider the case of a real AI according to you its worthless.
Moving to a society that considers virtual concepts as valuable can really help our environment by reducing the use of material items to denote wealth.
Boy you said it. See where this guy sold his "mummy collection" including various "parts" like feet and hands for @ $2 million. If you are looking for signs of the apocolypse this has to be toward the top of the list. What good are a bunch of dried up dead pople ( + "parts")? "Hey look at my dried up dead person", "OH WOW that is soo cool", "I paid $2 million for this", "You gotta be shitting me that is so cheap!" "Yeah you know Costco had them in big packages for 1/2 the price of Fred Meyer"
Money isn't wealth?!?! What kind of BS is that? Send me those pieces of paper then, and the keystrokes of your passwords... Oh you don't want to do that.. Surprise surprise.
And Salesmen are going to disappear?!?!?
What the hell are you smoking?!?!
Salesmen have been around for 1000's of years. Short of extinction, there will be salesmen.
Peak Oil is a slow roll over. A gradual decline. Further, peak oil does not mean there will no longer be energy. It may be scarcer, it may be more expensive, but it will still be produced.
Let me ask you this:
Are games of chance REAL? Dice? Cards? They've been around for a long time. What about pinball machines? Are they real? What about Massive Multiplayer Online Games? (IE World of Warcraft) Are they real?
They're all real!!
Can I find a used tool in a nearby location for sale on Cragslist.com? Absolutely!
Can I find information on growing a particular plant on Wikipedia? Yes. Can I investigate building my own greenhouse? Find out how to wire a new electrical outlet?
The internet is a QUANTUM LEAP FORWARD in terms of productivity, much like the telegraph, or satellites before it. Are they perhaps as energy efficient as they could be? Not even close. But more expensive energy will change that.
Maybe. Just maybe. Since you simply don't know, not a smart statement.
The internet produces nothing but electricity bills. It's nice and useful, but not wealth. Can it teach you how to grow food? No, you have to learn hands-on.
It can show you a picture of a plant, but not the thing itself.
The internet is a bundle of machines that are connected. The machines are made of very real natural resources. The internet is not. Without the hardware, the software is just a disk. You need hardware to read the code.
You hold on to the desire that a certain part of this society will last, and reason accordingly.
I distinguish what is real from what is not. And that is not decided by personal opinion.
If you think money is real, you should consider that it exponentially increases, it is "produced" by the trillions each year, while the amount of resources and energy available exponentially decreases.
Hence: money is disconnected from natural resources. And those are the things you need to drink, feed, dress, and find shelter.
The internet, cars, TV, money, etc are non-essential for life. However both are very real and both can be forms of wealth.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&defl=en&q=define:wealth&sa=X&oi=glossary_ definition&ct=title
The above is a link to google's definition page of wealth.
If you read through them, you will find that there are some differences in definition of what constitutes wealth. some take a harder approach like you and break that down to physical objects such as food, land, cars, and houses.
Other definitions mention things like talent, stocks, and money.
Money for the time being is broadly considered to be the measurement of wealth in this country.
But to say that just because its a piece of paper, or just some electrons doesn't mean it isn't wealth. If that is truly what you believe, I will be glad to accept all that un-wealthy paper you possess right now, and while you are at it, can I also have login information for any boards, email addresses, or other internet related "assets" you own?
I suppose a simpler question might be, is knowledge/access to knowledge a form of wealth? Is a book wealth? Is an instructional video wealth? Does the knowledge a master blacksmith imparts to an apprentice wealth?
In a way, that is what this debate revolves around. Good luck resolving it.
It does not imply that there is not an underlying reality, which is indeed real, we just can't access it until we become enlightened.
I live in Thailand, where Buddhism is only the second most convincing reason why everything we see around us is just a dream
I don't have any definitive proof, but if I have to guess between dream and reality, I'd have to pick what's behind door #1.
So a library isn't wealth?
One of the seven wonders of the ancient world was the library of Alexandria. KNOWLEDGE, although not tangible, is wealth.
What about the telephone?
If I'm cooking dinner, and I have a question about how to prepare something I can call my Mom. Or if I'm an astronomer, I can call another observatory and have them confirm what I'm seeing. Is there not value in that? How about making a reservation at a restaurant? Or arranging for delivery of supplies?
There is tremendous wealth to be found in communication and collaboration. The internet is a tool to facilitate both of these.
The internet is also used as a distributed computing tool. This is used for such various purposes as cancer research and SETI.
Wealth is not limited to "things". Computers and the internet maybe recent phenomenom, but what about philosophy?
I have worked as a data base arch. and system's designer for 25 years in large shops. The layers of abstraction of things running on top of other things thru networks... The complexity is astonishing.
Much of this wonderful modern times things like the internet and PC's for instance is incomprehensible to the vast mulitude that uses it.
What percentage of the populace do you think understands how the things they rely on work? In 1900 what percentage would that be? I think it would have been magnitudes larger.
You knew how a steam engine worked. Period.
The people I have worked with over the last 10 or so years have been outsourced almost entirely. HOWEVER !!! MUCH of what they designed and wrote(that everyone uses and depends on) is still running.
In a depression type scenario, I think you may see it resemble the people in the future in HG Wells Time Machine. Complex stuff, no one knowing how it was made or how it works.
Anyway, As Maslow would say, If you ain't got food, or shelter, the "Higher" things lose their value.
Hey, Can I fix your xxxx if you give me some food?
Nevermind
Accountants,
Database Administrators,
Network Administrators,
Human Resources,
Technical Support,
Customer Service Reps,
Billing specialists,
Phone Operator,
Salesmen
See that? All about to disappear.
Accountants and Salesmen will 'disappear'?
The programmers who write the code in the dedicated processoers will 'disappear'?
Got something to back such a claim up? Other than bluster?
I don't consider myself a doomer either, and yes, stegasaurus was my favorite dinosaur as well, but that doesn't mean that greater bandwidth will solve all of our problems or that Detroit's decline isn't a sign of things to come. Of course greater bandwidth is a silver bb, but at the same time things falling apart in Michigan could be a sign of things to come elsewhere.
BTW, Michigan is failing because of high oil prices, globalization, high healthcare costs, and high pension costs. IMHO, in that order. Are we the only state in the nation affected by these problems? Won't higher energy prices cause the same drain on household finances elsewhere that they are causing here?
odograph on Wednesday October 11, 2006 at 9:06 AM PST
If you start with the collapse of civilization, then you can say all kinds of things won't make a difference in the long run.
But as soon as you make collapse an open question, a LOT of the arguments here start to become unrooted.
Does that trigger a collapse of the US? I have no idea. However, I can't bring myself to blithely answer no. Does that trigger a collapse in the US auto industry, 80% of whose profits used to come from SUVs/light trucks? Could be, but my crystal ball says "Reply hazy, try again." Those companies provide over a million, high-paying, real-world jobs; they support another million or so retirees; their suppliers probably pay another million or two employees; etc. That's a lot of real-world money changing hands, as opposed to the free navel-gazing at youtube.
What will the loss of that north american auto industry money flow do to the SE Michigan economy, where I live? My crystal ball says "Outlook not so good." Since this "collapse" has already been happening for quite a while now, that's not too helpful. I'd ask to use your crystal ball, but it sounds a little too rosy.
From that position, I chat with people at either extreme who give me pat answers on fixed futures.
I do think that the true Cornucopians, like the true Doomers, are feeding outlook back in as input.
But how many "white collar" jobs that require no, or little physical presence could be done remotely, which in turn would cut down on commuting, and all the energy used in maintaining a commuting lifestyle.
Programmers,
Accountants,
Database Administrators,
Network Administrators,
Human Resources,
Technical Support,
Customer Service Reps,
Billing specialists,
Phone Operator,
Salesmen
and these are just the general categories of people in my current office which make up about 90% of my division of this company. Most of these positions could be accomplished with technology assistance from home. The cost in technology would increase expense, but when compared to a lower required floor space in this office building we rent plus all the costs in maintaining our environment,( cleaning crews, AC/heating, etc) I question just how much money would really be lost.
The main reason for not adopting this model in most IT corporations is that the proverbial "they" are still married to strong centralized control where they can keep an eye on everything, when in truth they really don't keep an eye on half the things they think they do. Its become almost an artform for employees to find ways around the security system at work to get to recreational sites like YouTube during work hours.
I can manage and analyze databases and our servers from home or from work(in fact I've been called on a few times to log in from home for emergencies). The only reason I come to work everyday to do my job here, is because the boss told me to. Why does he tell to? Cause I'm guessing his boss told him to as well.
Barbara, who occasionally posts here, has some fascinating stories about her grandparents' experiences in WWII Europe. The people who did best were the people who had the "physical" skills. The food rations were not enough to live on, so people either snuck out to the countryside on bicycles at night and bought food, or they bought it on the black market, at high prices. Farmers, carpenters, tailors, mechanics, etc., did all right, because people still needed their skills. The white collar office workers starved, because their skills were not needed.
I'm not talking about sudden collapse scenarios. I'm talking about averting/delaying collapse scenarios and removing waste(i.e. conservation) a step which will be required in a powerdown situation. Decentralizing office work would save energy in transportation, removing the need for as many office buildings thereby slowing urban growth, save energy on maintaining buildings (AC/heating, maintanence, etc) and I'm sure I'm just touching the tip of the iceberg.
A lot of people's jobs depend on the things you want to cut back on. Gas station attendants, highway maintenance workers, car salesmen, fuel truck drivers, fast food workers, tire manufacturers, etc. What's going to happen to them?
The ripples will eventually mean less need for database managers and network adminstrators.
The economic collapse could be quite sudden, especially given our debt levels.
But I'm not talking about situations in a collapsed state. I'm talking about situations in a pre-collapsed state where by the society in question is trying to post-pone and adapt to or prevent a collapse.
Decentralizing white collar jobs would be a way of accomplishing this. You are trying to argue with me from a paradigm I'm not even addressing nor care to address. My argument is based solely on a pre-collapse condition which is where the world finds itself at now.
Hope for the best, plan for the worst, and all that. The fact that we can't know the future is more reason to worry, not less.
I do think a dollar collapse is the thing we have to worry about the most. Eventually, our Chinese overlords are going to get nervous about our ability to pay back our debt. No one wants to see the U.S. economy collapse...but eventually, they're going to stop throwing good money after bad. And no one will want to be the last one out the door.
There will be a lot of needs to be met. What I question is our ability to pay people to meet those needs, in a world that has less and less energy but a larger and larger population each year.
Granted this is a pretty extreme example, but if agrarian society with no machines is where you think we are headed, then I don't think its impossible that issues thought "resolved" will resurface again such as slavery.
That's wasted energy for the other 14,000 future histories possible from this point. This makes my head reel, and makes me remember the slashdotters from yesterday.
They too are constraining their predictions by their notion of likely paths ... we don't know they are wrong ... we just know that our little value network here reinforces discussion along very different lines.
Yes, we crawled out of the Great Depression, and it didn't really take 25 years, rather about 15. But if your next major recession is only 10 years away, you may find yourself doing more backsliding than crawling out. Certainly we can adapt, but that adaptation may well be to decline, not just to temporary conditions. I'm not convinced that growth will be over forever, but there may be "considerable suffering", and just as everything on the way up of oil production was a transition, it may be all transition on the way down.
From a strictly economic point of view, you'd have to look for instance at what happened with the gold standard, and look through the conspiracy crap:
American Bankruptcy
Grocery deliverers.
Energy auditors.
Small car refurbishers.
.
.
Streetcar Conductors(*)
* - which comes full circle, because my great grandfather was a streetcar conductor in Vancouver, BC.
Wind turbine installers & maintenance. As NG prices go up, so do WTs :-)
More I am sure.
Best Hopes,
Alan
Or Soylent Green....
Undertakers cost money and use ICE powered hearses.
Just grave-diggers.
What happened in the 80's when computers started to replace secretaries?
They were retrained and put back into the workforce doing something that was still needed.
Car salesmen will become solar panel salesmen. Tire manufacturers will become wind turbine manufacturers.
Why exactly is fast food going away? And gas station attendants are already an all but extinct species. They were replaced by quickie mart employees, and those jobs will remain.
Stock market is down, apparently for fear that it's terrorism.
;->
October surprise? Weak!
But "government officials" say there's no reason to believe it's terrorism.
It probably is just an accident, but we can't afford anymore to just make that assumption and not pursue things immediately.
In Oregon you can't pump your own gas. An attendent has to do it for you.
On a recent vacation to Oregon, while getting our gas pumped by a rather hot looking attendent, my brother and I were debating about the feasibility of a Hooters variation of a Shell station. Say perhaps throw in a wet t-shirt carwash while we are at it.
(cackles evilly)
The economy was still expanding then. As long as the economy is growing, yes, that sort of substitution will occur. The "buggy whip" scenario.
But the end of cheap energy will mean the end of the ever-growing economy. The economy will start shrinking every year, instead of growing. There will be fewer jobs every year...but more people needing them.
There you clearly state it. The conclusion about a shrinking economy is used as justification for ... a shrinking economy?
I don't think that is a good loop.
Leanan did not say that. She assumed that "the end of cheap energy will mean the end of the ever-growing economy." I agree with that. But justifying that assumption was not attempted here. I know we won't convince you, odo, but many of us think that no matter how the clever chimps juggle the numbers (inflation vs. deflation, etc), when there will be less oil, there will be less "stuff" to go around. The average person (by definition) will therefore be poorer. Business models that rely on advertisements as the revenue source (Google, TV) will likely crash. Processes that rely on a large stream of waste (such as running VW microbusses on french-fry oil :-) will find that those waste streams slow to a trickle. (That applies to "cellulosic ethanol from ag/forestry waste products" too.)
That leaves open the question as to how the diminishing pie will be divided. There will be fewer jobs, unless in some way society will adapt to accept lower pay per job so there are jobs for more people. That could involve either lower-productivity full-time jobs or more part-time jobs. Alas our current culture (in the USA) pushes for productive full-time occupations, and those who fall out of that game are considered "losers" who have only themselves to blame. Some of them now live in Detroit.
In my opinion, the uncertainties are how strongly peak oil generalize to an energy crisis, and how strongly the presumed energy decline will impact the economy.
There is a whole other bar to be crossed to get from there to collapase ... unless of course you start there.
That leaves nuclear, wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, biomass, fusion. I think it's a real roll of the dice as to whether those are going to lead to more energy or just a decreased energy decline rate. That's one of the "known unknowns" in this whole process. Oil is most of our BTUs, so that's a lot of making up to do. (I'll find a pretty chart for this later, since the DOE website seems to be down at the moment.)
I think we can have some economic growth (not necessarily overall growth) in a declining energy environment, as long as the declines are mild, so that we can make up the difference with efficiency improvements. However, since our "trajectory" is toward more and more energy use, it's going to be quite a change in trajectory to continually work toward less energy use. Whether we can manage the transition well is another known unknown.
What's the hang-up?
Tom
I call it a loop when I see that commitment being fed in as an explanation for our present and near future.
If Detroit is going to take its lumps, learn its lessons, and move on .. then it isn't .. what was that phrase from up top?
"a snap-shot of the on-going 'catabolic collapse'"
However, I do see the "Greater Depression" scenario as probably the most optimistic outcome of peak oil's effect on the economy. At least in terms of how it will affect most of us personally. What it does to the environment is a whole different story.
In my opinion (as cheap as it is), a slow catabolic collapse of the good ol' USofA began with the first oil shocks in the 1970s. This essentially marked the time when world oil production increases slowed down considerably. We're three decades into the catabolic collapse. Probably have many more decades of deterioration to go. I suppose the events in the 1970s could possibly be considered T0 on Bakhtiari's four transitions, with T1 actually being the second.
-best,
It is unsatisfying to me to see each group declare themselves right, the other wrong, and to continue on with the same old original worldviews.
It gets to be more of a demonstration of how internet communities form around a fixed idea, than a demonstration of how ideas evolve.
I mean, show me 10 people who agree at TOD that we are all doomed, and I'll show you 10 people who have found each other.
So what do we get when we average the two (/. and TOD) views? Which one has more weight? Or are they equal? Or are they both wrong?
My feelings are that the energy limitations that many on TOD are expecting have a bit more weight. But, also, the more rosy view of technology-to-the-rescue may have enough pull to prevent a quick, catastrophic collapse. Global civilization, it seems to me, will slowly transform to a more energy-limited state. I think history bears this out--many civilizations that are now gone had a slow Shakespearian death over decades and even centuries.
Seems like a major (nuclear) war, and perhaps a global pandemic are the wildcards that could derail the catabolic collapse scenario and bring on a more rapid decline. Or, in the case of pandemic, it could conceivably allow the growth model to continue, once there's been adjustment to the initial shock of losing a significant portion of human beings. Vingean technological singularity is another wildcard, though I suspect it's a low-probability one. And such an event would completely alter the meaning of civilization. Indeed, civilization as we think of it might cease to exist at the point of singularity.
-best
Then I remembered something. It's an old one:
http://odograph.com/?p=105
I don't think the guys with the real technical chops come down on either extreme.
http://agonist.org/ian_welsh/20060623/the_great_long_suck
Come on Odo, join the circular anti-logic club!
Common themes found on The Oil Drum:
Usury (Interest) is Bad.
But the Feds lowering interest rates was criminal!
Suburban living is energy inefficient.
But large metropolitan areas are also energy inefficient.
The internet isn't REAL.
Yet here we are, a large global internet community, having rational(?) discussions on the impending energy crisis.
And the biggest:
We're at peak oil!
If we keep increasing our oil usage like this, in 100 years global warming is going to kill us all!
Actually I think their is nothing wrong with the strange responses on the various topics. It surprising how ingrained the growth economy is in all of us. Considering a world in which you may be technically savvy and inteligent but yet have no growth is a bit hard to imagine.
Actually I think we will grow but we will be smart enough at that point to keep the growth off the planet. The only thing we would need to realisticlly colonize space is a space elevator or other resonable way to access space. We could do it today if the world wanted. In this future world I think thats the only viable route to expand.
What this would do is slowly split the population into the growth oriented spacers and the stay behind natural stewards.
In a sense its cool becuase it give humanity a chance to try two different ways of living and I hope the nature stewards can have a positive influence on the space jocks so they don't destroy our solar system like we have our planet.
For now the transformation to a more sane balanced world is not something that many can comprehend but I think that we will have to go through this transition before we are ready to tackle taking our need for growth off planet.
If you think about it if we had been wise stewards of this planet we would have been in space and had colonies by now.
A bit of irony.
from Oct 06 Popular Science, by Rena Marie Pacella
Kind of puts PO into perspective, too, doesn't it?
I can see it now:
''Beautiful isnt she?
Just run your hand down the trim.
She's German you know.
Say fella, why dont we take her up onto the roof now?
Lets see how she looks and handles.''
I guess that begs the question: What is "wealth"? What is "real" value?
Insisting that prices are "wrong" is a mug's game.
If we are going to accept a term like "wealth", should we not also have something that is "anti-wealth"? (impovershment?)
What contributes to the impovershment of a society?
Maybe Adam Smith II can write a sequel entitled "The Impovershment of Nations and of the World"? What would he say?
Anyway, I'm not sure we know anymore what real wealth and real value are. In the purest sense, they're the tools and resources we need to survive.
For those living in the Pleistocene, wealth was measured by the resources in a given location, the tools one posessed, and the acquiantances at hand who could help track down food. The same could be said for our times, but the paradigm is different.
At any rate, we're reaching a point of diminishing returns, of which Youtube, and many other services I would consider infotainment, is an example.
I'm arguing that my country is deinvesting in industries that provide real value and investing in industries that provide infotainment services. It's a shame that a welder or a furniture maker can't make what a schmuck like me makes sitting in front of a keyboard all day. I must provide more value to our society blabbing on TOD than a welder who works his ass off making wind turbines.
Tom A-B
from China, but the point still reamins valid. Demand, in turn, is the result of millions of individual choices. If I'm buying something, I want to buy it as cheaply as possible. I've no incentive to pay extra. Until that situation changes America will be oversupplied with physical skills because foreigners will do it cheaper.
Either underlying economic conditions have to change - Peak Oil, the culture has to change, or government has to change in order to get out of this infotainment economy. Otherwise, it's just not rational to invest in skills that can be done much cheaper overseas.
Besides, I would rather see people watching videos than buying more cars.
Further, psychic income, as identified by Jerry Brown thirty something years ago is just if not more important than what people classify as real income. Ultimately, beyond basic physical needs, it is the psychic reward from a good or service, however intangible, that is important.
A lot of people here deal in information processing, creation, and sharing for a living. Are they all not producing "real" wealth. Keep your "real" wealth. I'll take a small percentage of Bill Gates' "unreal" wealth.
Something similar in my area happened, when the blue chip major employer had problems and was forced to lay off or transfer thousands of workers. The day the announcement was made, police asked gun shops to close...just in case. Real estate prices fell 50%, as people transferred out were forced to sell, and there were no buyers. Dozens of restaurants went out of business, since eating out is the first thing people cut back on. Many no-tell motels - the kind that rent rooms by the hour - also went belly-up, because they relied on office workers having affairs for their business.
But really, we need to transition anyway from an auto centric economy to an economy that focuses on moving people and object, when necessary, in the most efficient way. When that paradigm becomes reality, then those auto companies which cannot evolve to people and object moving will diappear.
An auto moving me across town for a meetingcreates value, but so do electrons that move my thoughts across the globe. I would argue that the value/energy proposition is much greater represented by the latter.
OH NO, NOT PIZZA DELIVERY AND YARD CARE!! THE TWO CORNERSTONES OF AN ADVANCED CULTURE!!
THE END TRULY IS NEAR!! :-O
Roger Conner known to you as ThatsItImout