When we people have full bellies and own plenty of toys and entertainments it is difficult to accept any information that tells us we've been doing things that will ultimately ruin us and our habitat.
We've acted as though we are on a permanent Easy Street only to discover that the street is not ours. It belongs to the Devil, who charges a rather high toll.
Had we explored our habitat more carefully, kept our population low, kept our ecological footprint per capita lower, then we might not be in this predicament.
The MSM will need several decades to pretend to report about this while actually providing more disinfotainment.
When we people have full bellies ... it is difficult to [get them to] accept any information that tells us we've been doing things that will ultimately ruin us
...that sort of begs the question as to whether they "can" accept the information, do the they have the capability to accept; as opposed to are they "willing" to accept?
Our TOD world can be divided along a spectrum that contains at least 3 kinds of people:
1. There are those who believe in the Town Bell hypothesis. It goes something like this:
1. IF only I/we ring the Town Bell loud enough and long enough, then the rest of the Town will awaken, see the oncoming danger (of Peak Oil) and the entire Town will do something to avoid or mitigate the associated calamity.
2. Not far behind are those who believe in the Halls-of-Power Dome Bell hypothesis. It goes something like this:
2. IF only I/we ring the Dome Bell in the Halls-of-Power (i.e. Wash. D.C.) loud enough and long enough, then the Powers-to-Be (TPTB) inside the Dome will awaken, see the oncoming danger (of Peak Oil) and the entire Dome will do something to avoid or mitigate the associated calamity.
3. And at the other extreme are those who believe in the Save-Yourself hypothesis. It goes something like this:
3. Forget about trying to ring the Dome Bell or the Town Bell. It's too late. Save yourself! Build a Noah's Ark (a life raft) and warn thine family, warn thine closest friends and get them to hop into the Noah's Ark (i.e. the Permaculture Commune).
Well, before we continue to debate among ourselves as to which of these philosophies is the correct one, should we not first investigate whether the "warnees" (those who are to be warned) have the physical capability to receive the warning?
It's not a question of whether they are willing (free will) to accept the message given that their bellies are full. It's a question of whether they CAN (no free will) accept the message in the first place, do they have the physical capability to receive and understand within the time it takes to pass the information/warning forward to them?
Let's try an experiment.
Here is a message for you:
#iaxua?#
Huh?
It's gibberish.
Very quickly you will conclude that the sender is a "nut job" and you will ignore any further messaging from the nut job.
Here is another message for you:
production Hubbert oil
There is no coherent English sentence here. However, if you are a regular TOD reader, these noises will "resonate" with you. There will be certain anchor points within your brain to which these noises can attach. And then you can start decoding the noises and start trying to make some sense of it. For example, the messenger might be trying to tell me something about oil production and about Hubbert's curve.
Of course if you have never heard about Hubbert's curve, then the noise: "Hubbert" is just a nonsense sound.
Similarly, if you have not learned science, thermodynamics, etc. then the noise about "energy crisis" is just nonsense sound.
Step:There are a few like myself that are almost in the "save yourself" category yet notice that the link between oil supply/consumption and economic growth is extremely tenuous. The global oil supply plateau is now 2.5 years old and during that period global GDP has not plateaued, it has actually grown rather sharply.The link between global oil supply and GDP growth appears to rest upon the importance of the global auto industry and related expenditures.IMO, the old saying "what is good for General Motors is good for America" is still resonating through the subconscious of many posters (with slight variations). The economic model based on selling more cars every year globally is going to come to an end (and all the expenditures related to that).Is that the only basis for economic growth and wealth creation? Maybe. Maybe not.
What I would contend is more tenuous is the link between GDP and the "real" economy. I not refering to some bootleg off-the-books exchanges, but rather just the part of the "measured" economy where something of real value is created. All lot of what transpires now, in terms of money flow, provides little net benefit yet shows up as evidence of economic vitality. If we suddenly stopped making anything new, we could continue selling each other our accumulated stuff on Ebay and keep the GDP robust for awhile.
What constitutes value in a real economic context? Something (whether it be extracted energy, raw materials, a product, a service, or information) which enhances society's ability to produce or do more of the same. Otherwise, it's like an expensive fireworks display; entertaining for awhile, but then the lights go out and all that's left is the acrid smoke and diminished ability to hear.
I agree that there's more to life than "value" as defined above, and we will need to embrace that more in a future economy since the usual fix of "more stuff" always costs energy.
A few years ago I tried to get information on how many dollars changed hands in the NYSE, Nasdaq, and the Merc. I couldn't find the data on the internet or at the public library. The question arose after a talk with a stock broker who said the entire federal budget could be paid for by only a 2% tax on the stock market. After a little extrapilation I concluded that at least 90% of all economic activity in the US was not included in the GDP. Government taxes the dimes which change hands on Main Street and turns a blind eye on the dollars that change hands on Wall Street. Somehow the paycheck of the stockbroker is counted as production but what he sells isn't consider a good or a service. The King never taxes himself.
At the core of the correct answer to the problem rests the simple historical observation that "what kills GM is good for Toyota, Honda, insert any other car company name except "Ford" here". Since Toyota, Honda etc. all produce in America, the overall impact of the demise of a few players with crappy management will be small. More cars will be sold globally, despite PO. More cars will be sold which will use less energy on average and then overall. Energy to power these cars will be generated from renewables. There are no physical energy limits here that we could reach with our current technology. The only thing that has reached an inflexion point is the hydrocarbon mining industry.
The trick is that those three classes of action area all ongoing now, at once. We have consumer articles on oil depletion - and resulting consumer action. We have government reports on oil depletion - and resulting government action. There are even articles about retreat to the bunker, and web pages that will help you order your equipment.
It is a typical, messy, human response.
And as is typical in human societies, some will Step Up to say that all approaches (but their own) are flawed.
That in itself is a distraction, because the icon of a perfect human response has never been achieved. Put another way, if you reject the mess, you reject reality, to retreat into fantasy futures.
That's the crux of the entire problem, isn't it, odograph? What happens if people in critical positions make messy decisions, like going to war for oil rather than conserving and switching to alternatives? That's precisely the problem that makes the assumption that all will be well so tenuous. We can't know if all will turn out well or badly. And given historical records of human behavior, the signs are not encouraging. I remind you once again of the Japanese response to being denied oil and rubber in the 1930s and the subsequent global cost.
In the past, because of a surplus of expendable energy, we've been able to try multiple paths at once to get out of box canyons in which we've found ourselves. There is good reason to question whether we continue to have that luxury if we are at a point where surplus energy supplies are going to become more and more constrained.
In the past, because of a surplus of expendable energy, we've been able to try multiple paths at once to get out of box canyons in which we've found ourselves. There is good reason to question whether we continue to have that luxury if we are at a point where surplus energy supplies are going to become more and more constrained.
When I look at the news feeds, search google news for "alternative energy" etc., it looks very much to me like we are at the stage where we dump out all our crayons, look them over, line them up, and figure out what we have.
In the past, because of a surplus of expendable energy, we've been able to try multiple paths at once to get out of box canyons in which we've found ourselves. There is good reason to question whether we continue to have that luxury if we are at a point where surplus energy supplies are going to become more and more constrained.
Good point. Everyone wants lots of "silver BBs." We often forget it takes some silver to make each one.
Your comment about silver BBs prompts me to repost this comment here. I was in a discussion on another board about electrical generation, and the relative merits of large base load approaches like nuclear with systems consisting of a lot of various small generating technologies. Basically cannon shells vs. silver BBs.
One thing I wonder when I read about complex distributed proposals like yours is what impact they will have on the resilience of our global socio-economic system. It strikes me that a highly complex, highly interconnected solution can only reduce the system's resilience. What I don't have a feel for is whether the distributed nature of the solution would restore the resilience to some degree, offsetting the complexity-driven loss. I know it would if the system were less interconnected, and the failure of one generating node couldn't impact its neigbours, but with all elements tied to the grid I start to worry. It's something to keep in mind - decreasing the interconnections by making the electrical system a set of isolated generating islands might make the whole system more robust, but it would also increases the difficulty of load management due to the smaller scale of each island. I don't have the knowledge yet to analyze the tradeoff.
It's certain that increasing the complexity of the generating system by incorporating a large number of different small-scale technologies will lower the overall EROEI and make both the electrical system and the socio-economic system that depends on it less resilient. That's probably just one of the costs of doing business at this stage, though.
One factor I don't believe is getting enough consideration in these deliberations is system resilience. Taking that into account can change the acceptability of some solutions - if they decrease resilience significantly for marginal benefit, we may be better off not doing them. I now feel this way about tying in lots and lots of wind farms to the grid.
One thing I've seen over and over again is that there is a huge tradeoff between efficiency and resilience. For example, organizations (corporations, universities, other nonprofits, governments) often have big inefficiencies built in. Those are not necessarily a bad thing. In organization theory there is a concept called "organizational slack" which refers to inefficiency--which can be reduced during hard times.
I also see in the material world a tradeoff between "efficiency" and durability or resilience. Fast sailboats tend to come apart. You can fly a DC-2 with a half a ton of ice on its wings (unlike fast modern aircraft). Durable organizations and boats and airplanes can function fairly well even when there are a whole bunch of things wrong with them.
Rather than focus on "complexity" as Tainter does, I think we should be more wary of efficiency. The best and longest lasting organizations (think U.S. government or any university you care to name) have large amounts of inefficiency built in. The fat and durable sailboats I like will be passed by sleek fast catamarans . . . which then go on to capsize or come apart in strong winds. Give me a boat that can ride out a storm and keep floating even if the rigging breaks and the boat is swamped or knocked down. You can keep your hyperefficient racing machines--which break and sink and are dismasted with great regularity.
Thanks. I'd been thinking about the role of efficiency since I encountered the concept of adaptive loops a few weeks ago. The three-dimensional diagram of the adaptive loop that I first saw in Thomas Homer-Dixon's book "The Upside of Down" came from the work of Dr. Buzz Holling. It has as its axes Productivity, Connectedness and Resilience. It made intuitive sense to me that efficiency should be included, except I don't know how you could show nice printed pictures of a loop in four-dimensional space.
Here is how I've been thinking of the inverse relationship of efficiency and resilience.
Resilience implies that the system has the ability to redirect resources from elsewhere within the system to contain and heal the impact of a shock. Crucially, this reallocation must not affect the system's performance in such a way that the reallocation itself acts as a secondary system shock. If the resources are reallocated from a portion of the system that can't function without them, the act of reallocation may become the first event in a breakdown cascade.
One definition of an inefficient system is that system operations have more resources available to them than are actually needed to accomplish the tasks. In this case, redirection of resources away from a task will have less of an impact since it is more probable that the task's efficiency can be improved to accommodate the loss.
In a very efficient system, all resources are fully utilized. Any redirection of resources is done in a zero-sum context - the task from which the resources are taken can no longer function (or at least can't function as fully). As a result, very efficient systems are much more prone to cascades, as resources are sequentially redirected to try and cope with the breakdown caused by the previous reallocation.
It now seems to me that it would be helpful to consider adaptive loops with axes of Efficiency, Interconnectedness and Resilience. Of course the brains at the Resilience Alliance have probably already thought this through. It makes me less sanguine, though, when I consider just how efficient our socio-economic system is, and how little slack we have left to play with.
Here's one additional thought. I just realized that every time a system reallocates resources to deal with a problem, it loses further efficiency. That happens both because the resources being reallocated may not be optimal for their new use, and some additional losses will occur due to something analogous to friction or thermodynamic effects. Not all of the resources you take away from the donor task make it to the target, and those that do may not be quite what's needed. Both effects result in the need to take away more resources from donor tasks than are needed for the repairs.
In a very efficient (ergo low resilience) system this spells mucho trouble, as it increases the effective damage of each cascading shock.
That is a pretty broad statement to rest on such a thin reed.
EVERY time? really? Often when resources are allocated to deal with a problem (Hmmm, anti smoking adds and public smoking bans to combat smoking) the system gains efficiency. Often the problem is the inefficiency itself (how much farmland are we using so that people can die earlier and at great expense?), so allocating resources to deal with it does the exact opposite of what you are saying.
Same thing with complexity BTW. People talk a good game about systems having some inherent complexity limit, or some such. Pure bunk. As a general rule, complex systems tend to work better than simple ones, otherwise why would the complexity have been added at all? It's nice when a system can be both simple and good, but in my experience, it's a rarity. You can see this in science (General relativity bumps off Newtonian physics), computer science (quicksort bumps off bubble sort), mathematics (Complex analysis easily tackles problems that 100 pages of algebra would never solve), etc...
Such broad and sweeping statements (including my own, of course) help nobody.
It seems to me that in this discussion with D.S., you've adopted the notion of efficiency as employed by economics in its mechanistic analogue (mainstream). Resilience necessarily is inseparable from time, while efficiency, in the sense you are employing it, is with-out time, or time-less. If efficiency was a measure of the effect of work on the rate at which entropy rises, and a lower rate a sign of greater efficiency, then it would stand side by side with resilience and not in opposition to it.
I haven't read the work of the Resilience Alliance, though I have completed 'The Upside of Down'. I suspect the problem of definition in relation to time is one reason the word efficiency is not used in the adaptive loop.
I think I see what you're saying, though my first thought was that "connectedness" is also time-less. I also don't see that resilience must necessarily have a temporal component - is "ability to recover" not as good a definition of resilience as "ability to recover within a given time period"? I'll give the hamster a poke and see if he can spin my mental gears a bit faster on this.
If you think of an airplane or a boat as a system that encounters rough weather through time, I think it becomes clear that the time dimension actually amplifies the tradeoff between efficiency and resilience.
(I prefer the term "robust," to "resilient" but let us not quibble over words.)
There are parallels between efficient systems and Tainter's complex systems. I am defining efficiency as getting more useful work per unit of energy input. To use an example, a more efficient car engine is one which gets better gas mileage. For equal weight and power, more efficient engines are more complex. A hybrid is both more energy efficient in operation and more complex in design than a non-hybrid gasoline engine. The consequences in going up the efficiency and complexity curves are the same. They both follow the law of diminishing returns. They both require more specilization, information processing and control.
They have more things which can go wrong.
Note also that significant redundancy in the modern world comes from parallel systems set in competition. That is one reason why "complexity" in the US did not mean the same thing as "complexity" in Soviet central planning. Organization matters.
I don't know your background, but you have said, here, one of the most insightful things I have read in a long time.
(maybe because I agree with it ;-)
The vast emphasis in business is on 'efficiency' and 'lean thinking'. There are merits to this *but*
my original discipline was military history. One of the iron laws of military activity is what you don't expect to go wrong, probably will. In no small part because you have an active, thinking opponent who constantly strives to identify your weaknesses, and exploit them.
(Iraq in 2003, Vietnam in 1965-69, Korea in 195-51, and the Market Garden landings at Arnhem in WWII (1944) are 4 easy examples of this truism. In each case, the US Army (or its British allies) was caught with its pants down by an opponent who responded quickly, and skilfully exploited the deficiencies of the American 'way of war')
Accordingly, military organisations exist with huge amounts of 'waste' and 'redundancy' that are only really tested under stress.
One of the problems with 'optimising' our peacetime military, and cutting the fat, is that the spare capacity that a unit has when the S-H-The-Fan is lost. The British military is the exemplar of this 'managerialist' tendency, over the last 30 years or so.
There is a reason why we have regiments that are 350 years old (although fast disappearing). Because the 'inefficiencies' of the regimental mess, the regimental staff, etc, give that organisation the capacity to be destroyed, and rebuilt, again and again.
By the same token, we have universities which are 1000 years old, which have made relatively little concessions to the 'modern' world. New College Oxford, the 'newer' college, was founded in 1341. Yet Oxford and Cambridge have had as many Nobel Prize winners as the top American universities.
Our National Health Service has a similar problem. We are making it more efficient, but that means we are having trouble dealing with 'superbugs' (because you need brute labour force to clean wards, and contractors don't do a good job relative to employed staff who believe in the mission of universal healthcare). And if we ever have another epidemic like the 1919 flu, we just don't have the coping mechanisms any more.
I see analogies to what happened to many businesses after 9-11: their entire production systems were predicated on 'just in time', yet the planes couldn't fly, and the containers were stopped at the border.
Similarly companies go through rounds of 'business process reegineering' and 'downsizing' and you see the long term deterioration in their market share and position and customer service.
Electricity is very special, and distinct from essentially all other major industrial goods because of the underlying physics.
Specifically:
* The electrical grid can transmit at nearly the speed of light.
* It is very costly to "store" inventory of electrical energy.
This makes the grid both physically possible, and essential. Natural gas is a little bit like this but to a lessser degree.
As such I think it is essential that the grid be maintained and made robust. When peak oil really hits, the grid is literally the only the between civilization and barbarism. I do not think that is an exaggeration.
It strikes me that a highly complex, highly interconnected solution can only reduce the system's resilience.
I disagree, in a way specific to electricity.
The problem with highly devolved power production and lack of large scale transmission is the much greater skilled labor needed to do it well. Power engineering is necessary and not for dummies---doing it wrong is very dangerous. With a grid and utility the number of people who Need to Know is proportional to the *logarithm* of the product produced, roughly. The problem is maintenance.
Does every building superintendent have the knowledge to run an efficient power generator with low cost and low emissions? Except for bone-head-simple PV solar, the answer's no. There's no way I would want all those hands tinkering on things.
I want people who spend their lives doing it for a living working on the power production and distribution.
The reality is that for most people a highly devolved (off-grid) power system is much less reliable, and requires much more maintenance and knowledge.
The current system is how it is for a good reason I believe.
With peak oil really starting to bite there will be a howl for A Fix Now!
I see two possibilities: (1) massive coal to liquids, and damn the environment, or (2) subsidized plug-in hybrids for everybody.
With the second, there's the potential that non-greenhouse sources might satisfy.
If we turn primary energy production back to coal, no matter what form, we're screwed.
We need to Keep The Grid Going no matter what.
The arguments for devolution seem more emotional---a return to the always mythical "simpler" "more local" times---than logical.
The problem with highly devolved power production and lack of large scale transmission is the much greater skilled labor needed to do it well. Power engineering is necessary and not for dummies---doing it wrong is very dangerous. ... The problem is maintenance.
Does every building superintendent have the knowledge to run an efficient power generator with low cost and low emissions? Except for bone-head-simple PV solar, the answer's no. There's no way I would want all those hands tinkering on things.
I want people who spend their lives doing it for a living working on the power production and distribution.
This kind of argument reminds me of how the priests of the mainframe computer room used to defend their turf:
The problem with highly devolvedcomputationpower production and lack of large scale centralized data transmission is the much greater skilled labor needed to do it well. ComputerPower engineering is necessary and not for dummies---doing it wrong is very dangerous. ... The problem is maintenance.
Does every building superintendent have the knowledge to run an efficient computerpower generator with low cost and low error rate?emissions? Except for bone-head-simple hobbyist micro-computers,PV solar,the answer's no. There's no way I would want all those hands tinkering on things.
I want people who spend their lives doing it for a living working on computer datapower production and distribution. :-)
One factor I don't believe is getting enough consideration in these deliberations is system resilience. Taking that into account can change the acceptability of some solutions - if they decrease resilience significantly for marginal benefit, we may be better off not doing them. I now feel this way about tying in lots and lots of wind farms to the grid.
in the case of wind farms, I think they could add to system resilience.
Because they diversify the fuel portfolio of the system. So losing your natural gas supply due to Russian politics or terrorist attack doesn't cut off *all* your fuel supply.
"What happens if people in critical positions make messy decisions, like going to war for oil rather than conserving and switching to alternatives?"
Can you prove that this has happened or is likely to happen? Or is it just one of those pet explanations people prefer because they don't like to go through the analysis of reality? It is always easier to say "thegovernmentdidit" than to actually reflect on geological reality and the consequences of ones own energy use.
"In the past, because of a surplus of expendable energy"
Again, this sentence completely ignores that we have just entered the solar age which gives us access to an energy stream from the sun that is orders of magnitude larger than anything we have tapped into, so far. We have more than just "a surplus" of energy. We got plenty. We are simply not using it.
Can you prove that this has happened or is likely to happen? Or is it just one of those pet explanations people prefer because they don't like to go through the analysis of reality? It is always easier to say "thegovernmentdidit" than to actually reflect on geological reality and the consequences of ones own energy use.
Japan's response to loss of oil and rubber resources precipitated their attack on the US opening up US involvement in WWII. Of course humans behave like this. Surely you know this wee bit of history?
Sorry, I should have clarified my statement: "Did any nation go to war lately for oil?", particularly refering to the US involvement in Iraq. Of course the robber barrons are plundering a country in this case... but it is the US they are taking for a ride, not Iraq.
I am aware of the historic facts, although even there I would say that Fascism and an invincibility complex of national leaders were far more to blame for what happened in WWII than anything else. Hitler was not looking for oil and natural resources per se. His (or maybe Goebbels') phrase "Lebensraum fuer das Deutsche Volk" had a much, much deeper philosophical meaning. The ideology was based on the idea that the world belongs to the strongest and that just like the Hordes from the East had overrun the West and destroyed the Roman Empire (despite that not being completely historic, but then, why do we expect a madman to be a precise historian?), the now stronger Arians had the right to go to the East and destroy and plunder whatever they wanted. He couldn't care less about the oil fields and mines in any of the countries they invaded. His generals and economic planners, of course, did. But then, they, all by themselves, would have never started a war in the first place. I think something similar is probably true for the Japanese, too, who thought of themself as the prime race of the East.
Hitler, by the way, is said to have relied in his "strategic planning" on the writings of the popular author Karl May, who wrote a bunch of nonsensical travel and Wild-West novels in which the Native Americans and the settlers refer to each other in the third person and the white hero marries the sister of the Indian Chief! His generals had at times to convince Hitler that the Wehrmacht could not simply march across mountain ranges which in his imagination were not there because he refused to look at the maps and instead cited Karl May's books about easy passage through Romania and parts of Russia... Needless to mention, Karl May had never been to the places he described, had written some of the books while in prison for stealing a gold watch and in general made up everything he ever wrote and Hitler was deranged enough to believe all of it.
But maybe this is not so far off from the idea that our generalissimus maximus has put approx. as much thought into the Iraq adventure as Der Fuehrer.
Paulus and Rommel were both headed for the near-eastern oil fields. Hitler possibly could have won the European war had Paulus bypassed Stalingrad and made a dash for Baku. Rommel failed only because the Brits had cracked the Italian codes and hence were able to sink most of the ships supplying Rommel. World War Two was won by the narrowest of margins.
And had the Japanese at Pearl Harbor burned the oil tanks rather than take out obsolescent battleships, they could have easily invaded and occupied Hawaii--which probably would have lead to a total Japanese victory in the Pacific in 1942 and 1943, because without Hawaii the U.S. Pacific fleet would have been severely constrained by fuel limitations.
The unconditional surrenders could very easily have been signed on the battleships Tirpitz and Yamato rather than the battleship Missouri.
Hitler could never have defeated Soviet Russia. Too many square miles, too much winter, too many Russians. Things really weren't that much different in 1941 from 1812. No possiblilty of surrender on Tirpitz.
Hitler did not need to defeat his former ally, Stalin: All he had to do was to get to Baku and seize the oilfields. He could have given Russia Finland and half of Poland; there was no military or political reason for Hitler to repeat the mistakes of Napoleon and Charles XII.
Even with the delay in Yugoslavia, the German forces came very close to Moscow with its vital rail center. Stalin could not have abandoned Moscow and fought on at the end of 1941; he would have had to make peace, because Soviet industry had not yet been moved far enough east. Because the Germans pissed away their forces in front of Lenningrad and above all at Stalingrad, the Soviet Union (with enormous help from Britain with the Ultra intelligence) was able to defeat the German army.
If you go back to 1940 and 1941, the smart money was on Hitler to win. Except for Churchill, few thought that Britain could hang on while the U.S. pretty much twiddled its thumbs, except for the strategic occupation of Iceland.
Much in war depends on chance--or to be more precise, war is chaotic. The U.S. was strongly isolationist, and had not the Japanese attacked at the end of 1941, it is not at all clear that Britain could have won the Battle of the Atlantic--which was a very near thing, with the Allies losing pretty much through most of 1942.
Once again, it comes down to oil. Had the U-boats prevailed, they could have cut Britain off from oil, and with its planes and ships and tanks immobilized, it is a tossup whether the Brits would have sued for peace before or after an invasion. My guess is that they would have fought a German invasion to the bitter end--but would have lost. Only American gasoline allowed the British to win the Battle of Britain--aided by the top-secret addition of tetraethyl lead to boost octane to allow the Hurricanes and Spits to defeat the German air force.
Thanks for that very interesting discussion on the logistics of WWII.
One does not have to wonder very hard on how far the USA could project its military might if its armed forces were cut off from a steady supply of oil and distillates.
The reason Hitler broke off from Moscow and headed for Stalingrad was precisely because he wanted to reach the Caucasian oil fields. He was obsessed with economic and infrastructural -- call it neo marxist -- reasons for going after specific objectives.
On this point you are entirely incorrect. The British invented "Lucy" a fake spy network supposedly based in Lucerne that passed Ultra intelligence to the Soviets. The great victory at Kursk was based on Soviet detailed tactical knowledge of German plans--knowledge passed along via the Ultra/Lucy network.
Only in the past dozen years has the full veil of secrecy been lifted from this Ultra/Lucy connection. Above all, the British had to guard from the Germans the fact that their Enigma codes and machines were not secure; hence the folderol of inventing a fake spy network. To his dying day, Hitler believed there was a traitor withing the German High Command. There was no traitor--just the arrogance of the Nazis who never imagined that a bunch of Brits could build the world's first computer (the "Bronze Goddess") and crack their most secret communications.
Intelligence and counterintelligence were of course shrouded by layers of secrets, and because of the Official Secrets Act in Britain, for fifty years nobody was allowed to say anything. Indeed, after World War Two the Bronze Goddess was destroyed--as being too dangerous to be allowed to exist, because of the power that it gave the code breakers.
Without the Ultra/Lucy intelligence, it is highly questionable whether the Soviets could have beaten the Germans, not only at Kursk but at all the later battles on the Eastern front. By the end of the War, the Soviets were depending entirely on the Lucy intelligence in their strategic and tactical planning to defeat the Germans. Stalin believed to his dying day that there was a traitor high in the German command structure; he was as ignorant of Ultra as was Hitler.
I don't really relish the Cassandra role.
When we people have full bellies and own plenty of toys and entertainments it is difficult to accept any information that tells us we've been doing things that will ultimately ruin us and our habitat.
We've acted as though we are on a permanent Easy Street only to discover that the street is not ours. It belongs to the Devil, who charges a rather high toll.
Had we explored our habitat more carefully, kept our population low, kept our ecological footprint per capita lower, then we might not be in this predicament.
The MSM will need several decades to pretend to report about this while actually providing more disinfotainment.
"If only..."
"And so it goes..."
Begging the question ....
...that sort of begs the question as to whether they "can" accept the information, do the they have the capability to accept; as opposed to are they "willing" to accept?
1. There are those who believe in the Town Bell hypothesis. It goes something like this:
2. Not far behind are those who believe in the Halls-of-Power Dome Bell hypothesis. It goes something like this:
3. And at the other extreme are those who believe in the Save-Yourself hypothesis. It goes something like this:
Well, before we continue to debate among ourselves as to which of these philosophies is the correct one, should we not first investigate whether the "warnees" (those who are to be warned) have the physical capability to receive the warning?
It's not a question of whether they are willing (free will) to accept the message given that their bellies are full. It's a question of whether they CAN (no free will) accept the message in the first place, do they have the physical capability to receive and understand within the time it takes to pass the information/warning forward to them?
Let's try an experiment.
Here is a message for you:
Huh?
It's gibberish.
Very quickly you will conclude that the sender is a "nut job" and you will ignore any further messaging from the nut job.
Here is another message for you:
There is no coherent English sentence here. However, if you are a regular TOD reader, these noises will "resonate" with you. There will be certain anchor points within your brain to which these noises can attach. And then you can start decoding the noises and start trying to make some sense of it. For example, the messenger might be trying to tell me something about oil production and about Hubbert's curve.
Of course if you have never heard about Hubbert's curve, then the noise: "Hubbert" is just a nonsense sound.
Similarly, if you have not learned science, thermodynamics, etc. then the noise about "energy crisis" is just nonsense sound.
So again,
I ask you a question (iaxua?):
Can they accept the information?
Step:There are a few like myself that are almost in the "save yourself" category yet notice that the link between oil supply/consumption and economic growth is extremely tenuous. The global oil supply plateau is now 2.5 years old and during that period global GDP has not plateaued, it has actually grown rather sharply.The link between global oil supply and GDP growth appears to rest upon the importance of the global auto industry and related expenditures.IMO, the old saying "what is good for General Motors is good for America" is still resonating through the subconscious of many posters (with slight variations). The economic model based on selling more cars every year globally is going to come to an end (and all the expenditures related to that).Is that the only basis for economic growth and wealth creation? Maybe. Maybe not.
What I would contend is more tenuous is the link between GDP and the "real" economy. I not refering to some bootleg off-the-books exchanges, but rather just the part of the "measured" economy where something of real value is created. All lot of what transpires now, in terms of money flow, provides little net benefit yet shows up as evidence of economic vitality. If we suddenly stopped making anything new, we could continue selling each other our accumulated stuff on Ebay and keep the GDP robust for awhile.
What constitutes value in a real economic context? Something (whether it be extracted energy, raw materials, a product, a service, or information) which enhances society's ability to produce or do more of the same. Otherwise, it's like an expensive fireworks display; entertaining for awhile, but then the lights go out and all that's left is the acrid smoke and diminished ability to hear.
I agree that there's more to life than "value" as defined above, and we will need to embrace that more in a future economy since the usual fix of "more stuff" always costs energy.
A few years ago I tried to get information on how many dollars changed hands in the NYSE, Nasdaq, and the Merc. I couldn't find the data on the internet or at the public library. The question arose after a talk with a stock broker who said the entire federal budget could be paid for by only a 2% tax on the stock market. After a little extrapilation I concluded that at least 90% of all economic activity in the US was not included in the GDP. Government taxes the dimes which change hands on Main Street and turns a blind eye on the dollars that change hands on Wall Street. Somehow the paycheck of the stockbroker is counted as production but what he sells isn't consider a good or a service. The King never taxes himself.
At the core of the correct answer to the problem rests the simple historical observation that "what kills GM is good for Toyota, Honda, insert any other car company name except "Ford" here". Since Toyota, Honda etc. all produce in America, the overall impact of the demise of a few players with crappy management will be small. More cars will be sold globally, despite PO. More cars will be sold which will use less energy on average and then overall. Energy to power these cars will be generated from renewables. There are no physical energy limits here that we could reach with our current technology. The only thing that has reached an inflexion point is the hydrocarbon mining industry.
The trick is that those three classes of action area all ongoing now, at once. We have consumer articles on oil depletion - and resulting consumer action. We have government reports on oil depletion - and resulting government action. There are even articles about retreat to the bunker, and web pages that will help you order your equipment.
It is a typical, messy, human response.
And as is typical in human societies, some will Step Up to say that all approaches (but their own) are flawed.
That in itself is a distraction, because the icon of a perfect human response has never been achieved. Put another way, if you reject the mess, you reject reality, to retreat into fantasy futures.
That's the crux of the entire problem, isn't it, odograph? What happens if people in critical positions make messy decisions, like going to war for oil rather than conserving and switching to alternatives? That's precisely the problem that makes the assumption that all will be well so tenuous. We can't know if all will turn out well or badly. And given historical records of human behavior, the signs are not encouraging. I remind you once again of the Japanese response to being denied oil and rubber in the 1930s and the subsequent global cost.
In the past, because of a surplus of expendable energy, we've been able to try multiple paths at once to get out of box canyons in which we've found ourselves. There is good reason to question whether we continue to have that luxury if we are at a point where surplus energy supplies are going to become more and more constrained.
When I look at the news feeds, search google news for "alternative energy" etc., it looks very much to me like we are at the stage where we dump out all our crayons, look them over, line them up, and figure out what we have.
Schrödinger's Crayons ;-)
Good point. Everyone wants lots of "silver BBs." We often forget it takes some silver to make each one.
Your comment about silver BBs prompts me to repost this comment here. I was in a discussion on another board about electrical generation, and the relative merits of large base load approaches like nuclear with systems consisting of a lot of various small generating technologies. Basically cannon shells vs. silver BBs.
One factor I don't believe is getting enough consideration in these deliberations is system resilience. Taking that into account can change the acceptability of some solutions - if they decrease resilience significantly for marginal benefit, we may be better off not doing them. I now feel this way about tying in lots and lots of wind farms to the grid.
Agreed. I think that's part of what Greer was getting at with the sliderule thing.
System resilience is a tricky concept.
One thing I've seen over and over again is that there is a huge tradeoff between efficiency and resilience. For example, organizations (corporations, universities, other nonprofits, governments) often have big inefficiencies built in. Those are not necessarily a bad thing. In organization theory there is a concept called "organizational slack" which refers to inefficiency--which can be reduced during hard times.
I also see in the material world a tradeoff between "efficiency" and durability or resilience. Fast sailboats tend to come apart. You can fly a DC-2 with a half a ton of ice on its wings (unlike fast modern aircraft). Durable organizations and boats and airplanes can function fairly well even when there are a whole bunch of things wrong with them.
Rather than focus on "complexity" as Tainter does, I think we should be more wary of efficiency. The best and longest lasting organizations (think U.S. government or any university you care to name) have large amounts of inefficiency built in. The fat and durable sailboats I like will be passed by sleek fast catamarans . . . which then go on to capsize or come apart in strong winds. Give me a boat that can ride out a storm and keep floating even if the rigging breaks and the boat is swamped or knocked down. You can keep your hyperefficient racing machines--which break and sink and are dismasted with great regularity.
Thanks. I'd been thinking about the role of efficiency since I encountered the concept of adaptive loops a few weeks ago. The three-dimensional diagram of the adaptive loop that I first saw in Thomas Homer-Dixon's book "The Upside of Down" came from the work of Dr. Buzz Holling. It has as its axes Productivity, Connectedness and Resilience. It made intuitive sense to me that efficiency should be included, except I don't know how you could show nice printed pictures of a loop in four-dimensional space.
Here is how I've been thinking of the inverse relationship of efficiency and resilience.
Resilience implies that the system has the ability to redirect resources from elsewhere within the system to contain and heal the impact of a shock. Crucially, this reallocation must not affect the system's performance in such a way that the reallocation itself acts as a secondary system shock. If the resources are reallocated from a portion of the system that can't function without them, the act of reallocation may become the first event in a breakdown cascade.
One definition of an inefficient system is that system operations have more resources available to them than are actually needed to accomplish the tasks. In this case, redirection of resources away from a task will have less of an impact since it is more probable that the task's efficiency can be improved to accommodate the loss.
In a very efficient system, all resources are fully utilized. Any redirection of resources is done in a zero-sum context - the task from which the resources are taken can no longer function (or at least can't function as fully). As a result, very efficient systems are much more prone to cascades, as resources are sequentially redirected to try and cope with the breakdown caused by the previous reallocation.
It now seems to me that it would be helpful to consider adaptive loops with axes of Efficiency, Interconnectedness and Resilience. Of course the brains at the Resilience Alliance have probably already thought this through. It makes me less sanguine, though, when I consider just how efficient our socio-economic system is, and how little slack we have left to play with.
Here's one additional thought. I just realized that every time a system reallocates resources to deal with a problem, it loses further efficiency. That happens both because the resources being reallocated may not be optimal for their new use, and some additional losses will occur due to something analogous to friction or thermodynamic effects. Not all of the resources you take away from the donor task make it to the target, and those that do may not be quite what's needed. Both effects result in the need to take away more resources from donor tasks than are needed for the repairs.
In a very efficient (ergo low resilience) system this spells mucho trouble, as it increases the effective damage of each cascading shock.
I think Wal-Mart is finding that out.
That is a pretty broad statement to rest on such a thin reed.
EVERY time? really? Often when resources are allocated to deal with a problem (Hmmm, anti smoking adds and public smoking bans to combat smoking) the system gains efficiency. Often the problem is the inefficiency itself (how much farmland are we using so that people can die earlier and at great expense?), so allocating resources to deal with it does the exact opposite of what you are saying.
Same thing with complexity BTW. People talk a good game about systems having some inherent complexity limit, or some such. Pure bunk. As a general rule, complex systems tend to work better than simple ones, otherwise why would the complexity have been added at all? It's nice when a system can be both simple and good, but in my experience, it's a rarity. You can see this in science (General relativity bumps off Newtonian physics), computer science (quicksort bumps off bubble sort), mathematics (Complex analysis easily tackles problems that 100 pages of algebra would never solve), etc...
Such broad and sweeping statements (including my own, of course) help nobody.
It seems to me that in this discussion with D.S., you've adopted the notion of efficiency as employed by economics in its mechanistic analogue (mainstream). Resilience necessarily is inseparable from time, while efficiency, in the sense you are employing it, is with-out time, or time-less. If efficiency was a measure of the effect of work on the rate at which entropy rises, and a lower rate a sign of greater efficiency, then it would stand side by side with resilience and not in opposition to it.
I haven't read the work of the Resilience Alliance, though I have completed 'The Upside of Down'. I suspect the problem of definition in relation to time is one reason the word efficiency is not used in the adaptive loop.
I think I see what you're saying, though my first thought was that "connectedness" is also time-less. I also don't see that resilience must necessarily have a temporal component - is "ability to recover" not as good a definition of resilience as "ability to recover within a given time period"? I'll give the hamster a poke and see if he can spin my mental gears a bit faster on this.
If you think of an airplane or a boat as a system that encounters rough weather through time, I think it becomes clear that the time dimension actually amplifies the tradeoff between efficiency and resilience.
(I prefer the term "robust," to "resilient" but let us not quibble over words.)
There are parallels between efficient systems and Tainter's complex systems. I am defining efficiency as getting more useful work per unit of energy input. To use an example, a more efficient car engine is one which gets better gas mileage. For equal weight and power, more efficient engines are more complex. A hybrid is both more energy efficient in operation and more complex in design than a non-hybrid gasoline engine. The consequences in going up the efficiency and complexity curves are the same. They both follow the law of diminishing returns. They both require more specilization, information processing and control.
They have more things which can go wrong.
Note also that significant redundancy in the modern world comes from parallel systems set in competition. That is one reason why "complexity" in the US did not mean the same thing as "complexity" in Soviet central planning. Organization matters.
Don
I don't know your background, but you have said, here, one of the most insightful things I have read in a long time.
(maybe because I agree with it ;-)
The vast emphasis in business is on 'efficiency' and 'lean thinking'. There are merits to this *but*
my original discipline was military history. One of the iron laws of military activity is what you don't expect to go wrong, probably will. In no small part because you have an active, thinking opponent who constantly strives to identify your weaknesses, and exploit them.
(Iraq in 2003, Vietnam in 1965-69, Korea in 195-51, and the Market Garden landings at Arnhem in WWII (1944) are 4 easy examples of this truism. In each case, the US Army (or its British allies) was caught with its pants down by an opponent who responded quickly, and skilfully exploited the deficiencies of the American 'way of war')
Accordingly, military organisations exist with huge amounts of 'waste' and 'redundancy' that are only really tested under stress.
One of the problems with 'optimising' our peacetime military, and cutting the fat, is that the spare capacity that a unit has when the S-H-The-Fan is lost. The British military is the exemplar of this 'managerialist' tendency, over the last 30 years or so.
There is a reason why we have regiments that are 350 years old (although fast disappearing). Because the 'inefficiencies' of the regimental mess, the regimental staff, etc, give that organisation the capacity to be destroyed, and rebuilt, again and again.
By the same token, we have universities which are 1000 years old, which have made relatively little concessions to the 'modern' world. New College Oxford, the 'newer' college, was founded in 1341. Yet Oxford and Cambridge have had as many Nobel Prize winners as the top American universities.
Our National Health Service has a similar problem. We are making it more efficient, but that means we are having trouble dealing with 'superbugs' (because you need brute labour force to clean wards, and contractors don't do a good job relative to employed staff who believe in the mission of universal healthcare). And if we ever have another epidemic like the 1919 flu, we just don't have the coping mechanisms any more.
I see analogies to what happened to many businesses after 9-11: their entire production systems were predicated on 'just in time', yet the planes couldn't fly, and the containers were stopped at the border.
Similarly companies go through rounds of 'business process reegineering' and 'downsizing' and you see the long term deterioration in their market share and position and customer service.
Electricity is very special, and distinct from essentially all other major industrial goods because of the underlying physics.
Specifically:
* The electrical grid can transmit at nearly the speed of light.
* It is very costly to "store" inventory of electrical energy.
This makes the grid both physically possible, and essential. Natural gas is a little bit like this but to a lessser degree.
As such I think it is essential that the grid be maintained and made robust. When peak oil really hits, the grid is literally the only the between civilization and barbarism. I do not think that is an exaggeration.
It strikes me that a highly complex, highly interconnected solution can only reduce the system's resilience.
I disagree, in a way specific to electricity.
The problem with highly devolved power production and lack of large scale transmission is the much greater skilled labor needed to do it well. Power engineering is necessary and not for dummies---doing it wrong is very dangerous. With a grid and utility the number of people who Need to Know is proportional to the *logarithm* of the product produced, roughly. The problem is maintenance.
Does every building superintendent have the knowledge to run an efficient power generator with low cost and low emissions? Except for bone-head-simple PV solar, the answer's no. There's no way I would want all those hands tinkering on things.
I want people who spend their lives doing it for a living working on the power production and distribution.
The reality is that for most people a highly devolved (off-grid) power system is much less reliable, and requires much more maintenance and knowledge.
The current system is how it is for a good reason I believe.
With peak oil really starting to bite there will be a howl for A Fix Now!
I see two possibilities: (1) massive coal to liquids, and damn the environment, or (2) subsidized plug-in hybrids for everybody.
With the second, there's the potential that non-greenhouse sources might satisfy.
If we turn primary energy production back to coal, no matter what form, we're screwed.
We need to Keep The Grid Going no matter what.
The arguments for devolution seem more emotional---a return to the always mythical "simpler" "more local" times---than logical.
This kind of argument reminds me of how the priests of the mainframe computer room used to defend their turf:
The problem with highly devolved computation
power productionand lack of large scale centralized data transmission is the much greater skilled labor needed to do it well. ComputerPowerengineering is necessary and not for dummies---doing it wrong is very dangerous. ... The problem is maintenance.Does every building superintendent have the knowledge to run an efficient computer
power generatorwith low cost and low error rate?emissions?Except for bone-head-simple hobbyist micro-computers,PV solar,the answer's no. There's no way I would want all those hands tinkering on things.I want people who spend their lives doing it for a living working on computer data
powerproduction and distribution. :-)Although
in the case of wind farms, I think they could add to system resilience.
Because they diversify the fuel portfolio of the system. So losing your natural gas supply due to Russian politics or terrorist attack doesn't cut off *all* your fuel supply.
"What happens if people in critical positions make messy decisions, like going to war for oil rather than conserving and switching to alternatives?"
Can you prove that this has happened or is likely to happen? Or is it just one of those pet explanations people prefer because they don't like to go through the analysis of reality? It is always easier to say "thegovernmentdidit" than to actually reflect on geological reality and the consequences of ones own energy use.
"In the past, because of a surplus of expendable energy"
Again, this sentence completely ignores that we have just entered the solar age which gives us access to an energy stream from the sun that is orders of magnitude larger than anything we have tapped into, so far. We have more than just "a surplus" of energy. We got plenty. We are simply not using it.
Japan's response to loss of oil and rubber resources precipitated their attack on the US opening up US involvement in WWII. Of course humans behave like this. Surely you know this wee bit of history?
Next question?
Sorry, I should have clarified my statement: "Did any nation go to war lately for oil?", particularly refering to the US involvement in Iraq. Of course the robber barrons are plundering a country in this case... but it is the US they are taking for a ride, not Iraq.
I am aware of the historic facts, although even there I would say that Fascism and an invincibility complex of national leaders were far more to blame for what happened in WWII than anything else. Hitler was not looking for oil and natural resources per se. His (or maybe Goebbels') phrase "Lebensraum fuer das Deutsche Volk" had a much, much deeper philosophical meaning. The ideology was based on the idea that the world belongs to the strongest and that just like the Hordes from the East had overrun the West and destroyed the Roman Empire (despite that not being completely historic, but then, why do we expect a madman to be a precise historian?), the now stronger Arians had the right to go to the East and destroy and plunder whatever they wanted. He couldn't care less about the oil fields and mines in any of the countries they invaded. His generals and economic planners, of course, did. But then, they, all by themselves, would have never started a war in the first place. I think something similar is probably true for the Japanese, too, who thought of themself as the prime race of the East.
Hitler, by the way, is said to have relied in his "strategic planning" on the writings of the popular author Karl May, who wrote a bunch of nonsensical travel and Wild-West novels in which the Native Americans and the settlers refer to each other in the third person and the white hero marries the sister of the Indian Chief! His generals had at times to convince Hitler that the Wehrmacht could not simply march across mountain ranges which in his imagination were not there because he refused to look at the maps and instead cited Karl May's books about easy passage through Romania and parts of Russia... Needless to mention, Karl May had never been to the places he described, had written some of the books while in prison for stealing a gold watch and in general made up everything he ever wrote and Hitler was deranged enough to believe all of it.
But maybe this is not so far off from the idea that our generalissimus maximus has put approx. as much thought into the Iraq adventure as Der Fuehrer.
:-)
Paulus and Rommel were both headed for the near-eastern oil fields. Hitler possibly could have won the European war had Paulus bypassed Stalingrad and made a dash for Baku. Rommel failed only because the Brits had cracked the Italian codes and hence were able to sink most of the ships supplying Rommel. World War Two was won by the narrowest of margins.
And had the Japanese at Pearl Harbor burned the oil tanks rather than take out obsolescent battleships, they could have easily invaded and occupied Hawaii--which probably would have lead to a total Japanese victory in the Pacific in 1942 and 1943, because without Hawaii the U.S. Pacific fleet would have been severely constrained by fuel limitations.
The unconditional surrenders could very easily have been signed on the battleships Tirpitz and Yamato rather than the battleship Missouri.
Hitler could never have defeated Soviet Russia. Too many square miles, too much winter, too many Russians. Things really weren't that much different in 1941 from 1812. No possiblilty of surrender on Tirpitz.
Hitler did not need to defeat his former ally, Stalin: All he had to do was to get to Baku and seize the oilfields. He could have given Russia Finland and half of Poland; there was no military or political reason for Hitler to repeat the mistakes of Napoleon and Charles XII.
Even with the delay in Yugoslavia, the German forces came very close to Moscow with its vital rail center. Stalin could not have abandoned Moscow and fought on at the end of 1941; he would have had to make peace, because Soviet industry had not yet been moved far enough east. Because the Germans pissed away their forces in front of Lenningrad and above all at Stalingrad, the Soviet Union (with enormous help from Britain with the Ultra intelligence) was able to defeat the German army.
If you go back to 1940 and 1941, the smart money was on Hitler to win. Except for Churchill, few thought that Britain could hang on while the U.S. pretty much twiddled its thumbs, except for the strategic occupation of Iceland.
Much in war depends on chance--or to be more precise, war is chaotic. The U.S. was strongly isolationist, and had not the Japanese attacked at the end of 1941, it is not at all clear that Britain could have won the Battle of the Atlantic--which was a very near thing, with the Allies losing pretty much through most of 1942.
Once again, it comes down to oil. Had the U-boats prevailed, they could have cut Britain off from oil, and with its planes and ships and tanks immobilized, it is a tossup whether the Brits would have sued for peace before or after an invasion. My guess is that they would have fought a German invasion to the bitter end--but would have lost. Only American gasoline allowed the British to win the Battle of Britain--aided by the top-secret addition of tetraethyl lead to boost octane to allow the Hurricanes and Spits to defeat the German air force.
Sailorman,
One does not have to wonder very hard on how far the USA could project its military might if its armed forces were cut off from a steady supply of oil and distillates.
The reason Hitler broke off from Moscow and headed for Stalingrad was precisely because he wanted to reach the Caucasian oil fields. He was obsessed with economic and infrastructural -- call it neo marxist -- reasons for going after specific objectives.
Actually British intelligence was virtually unused by the USSR.
On this point you are entirely incorrect. The British invented "Lucy" a fake spy network supposedly based in Lucerne that passed Ultra intelligence to the Soviets. The great victory at Kursk was based on Soviet detailed tactical knowledge of German plans--knowledge passed along via the Ultra/Lucy network.
Only in the past dozen years has the full veil of secrecy been lifted from this Ultra/Lucy connection. Above all, the British had to guard from the Germans the fact that their Enigma codes and machines were not secure; hence the folderol of inventing a fake spy network. To his dying day, Hitler believed there was a traitor withing the German High Command. There was no traitor--just the arrogance of the Nazis who never imagined that a bunch of Brits could build the world's first computer (the "Bronze Goddess") and crack their most secret communications.
Intelligence and counterintelligence were of course shrouded by layers of secrets, and because of the Official Secrets Act in Britain, for fifty years nobody was allowed to say anything. Indeed, after World War Two the Bronze Goddess was destroyed--as being too dangerous to be allowed to exist, because of the power that it gave the code breakers.
Without the Ultra/Lucy intelligence, it is highly questionable whether the Soviets could have beaten the Germans, not only at Kursk but at all the later battles on the Eastern front. By the end of the War, the Soviets were depending entirely on the Lucy intelligence in their strategic and tactical planning to defeat the Germans. Stalin believed to his dying day that there was a traitor high in the German command structure; he was as ignorant of Ultra as was Hitler.