We are hitting the absolute peaks of fossil fuels in possibly as little as a decade from now also. The current arrangements are only possible with a constantly high energy throughput. There’s considerable limits right now on how much growth can be achieved. And there are more things than ever competing for energy consumption too - including the rise of AI (which is causing energy consumption to soar again after ~2 decades of being flat in Western countries).

The thing is, it’s still a huge increase.

The problem with Reddit turning into Instagram is that IG already exists.

At the rate they’re going, their actual destination is Tumblr, a company that destroyed their brand trying to fit in with generic corporate BigTech.

Anecdotally, bird migration seems much quieter this year. At times we have had enormous flocks of warblers passing through around this time of the year. There are still birds but it is a fraction of the normal volume. This may also be related to the odd weather we’ve been having though, I’m not sure.

A lot of people still think it’s possible to have an energy transition, even those who should know better and are very well aware of the decline of oil resources - for example, Dennis Coyne who runs Peak Oil Barrel. He knows very well, because he’s made mathematical models to that effect, that oil production could decline by about 1/3 by 2050. But he thinks a transition will occur by then. I think it’s a religious-like belief at this point that there has to be something waiting in the wings to save us. Oh, and the mainstream opinion is, by the way, that oil supplies are plateauing because of lower demand (because of this alleged transition) and not because we are depleting the main sources.

On the other hand, you have guys like Art Berman who think supplies will last a good deal longer but that there will still be enormous upheaval in the coming century. Out here on the fringes there’s not much consensus.

“Are…the public well-informed?” I’m assuming that headline was meant as sarcasm.

Terrible choice caving into the pseudo-moralists, but they’ve been going down a bad path for a long time. They should’ve looked at the cautionary tale of Tumblr before committing this own goal. Making sweeping changes to fit in with corporate agendas may be popular among their own class, but it also has the longer-term effect of sacrificing the user base. And they’ve been hemorrhaging for a while anyway. Where do they think their future profits will come from?

He’s clearly implying that this policy will eventually be misused to euthanize people.

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

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

And you can still buy them…

And the cloud really isn’t cheaper…

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