Not far from numbers i have been seeing for about 40 years now; except coal is about 300 years and fission is about 700 years in the numbers i most frequently see. Maybe that is US only production and consumption.
=46or an interesting diversion on per capita energy intensity look up "earthlight" nighttime illumination photo-maps (available from NASA). You will have to compare it with population density maps for a proper appreciation.
will=20
I am trying for that for myself. Are you figuring on some kind of collapse?
You intrigue me. Would you care to elaborate on that thought? The meaning of "inherited" information is unclear to me. For that matter, what is "masking market signaling"?
...
It's worth the market price of a barrel of oil. Possibly more if the output is really the fraction we want, and not crude oil.
I've had the same idea. But are there commercializable* processes to convert water + CO2 -> hydrocarbons + oxygen, using electricity? ...
*Any ideas on the correct spelling of that word? Or if it's a word? Perhaps I mean "feasible".
"Inherited" means that some other person wrote it down, you read it ( and possibly used it).
Markets signal supply and demand by price information. In the Soviet Union, prices were set by comittee and did not reflect information about supply and demand, leading to overproduction of come things and underproduction of other things. There was an extensive black market economy.
it's a trick question. What's something worth? What it costs to replace it. What do you replace a barrel of oil with? We don't know.
Dunno. I'm pretty sure that if you have ways of generating lots of heat and pressure, oil-like products can be made out of just about any organic material.
This statement can only be made when you look back, which is a single pathway.
Wrong. Backtrace graphic arts and computer usage.
You don't know what you're talking about. Consider the manufacture of the first stirrup.
No, you cannot. You cannot determine how a person took one idea from here and another idea from there and created something which caused other people to do similar actions with a result of creating a completely new industry.
Ah, so you're too lazy to do these kinds of tracebacks yet declare that all are single pathways.
Why would you expect anything AlwaysWrong posts to compute? Everyone on SED, and relate groups, calls him "AlwaysWrong" or "DimBulb". These names are well deserved. BTW, he posts under 60+ nyms, though his insanity is not hard to spot.
No, end of oil is always going to happen in the next 30-50 years. 40 years later it is still going to happen 30-50 years later. In another 40 years it will still going to happen in 30-50 years, such is the nature of the beast.
So, when will the end of world happen?
You can definitely see a good correlation between the level of illumination and economic / political freedom. Surprise, surprise!
I can cash out of all my Wells Fargo accounts at any time. I can even withdraw all my checking and savings and IRAs but still owe them the roughly $300K that's left on a mortgage.
Governments do that when they need more money than they have. It's essentially a tax on savings. The US gov will probably do it again in the next decade, to dilute the value of all its liabilities.
Buy real estate and/or develop intellectual property.
Many lawyers. Makers of jewelry and $60 entrees and $1200 jeans. Lots and lots of government employees. Pro athletes. Lots of middlemen and brokers and speculators. Retirees. Lots of academics. People on welfare and disability.
Basic food is cheap - $1 a day will fill basic needs - and should be available to anyone without question. That would be a lot cheaper than the welfare/food stamp overhead we have now. The per-instance quantities would have to be reasonably limited to keep people from feeding it to their pigs, or making barrels of beer from free pasta.
What would be great is a chain of free clinics manned by nurse practitioners, to do limited/basic stuff and supply generic drugs that would keep a lot of low-income people healthy and out of ERs. Sort of like the things at Wal-Mart.
I already spend $5K a year or so on Doctors Without Borders, another $25K on similar stuff. How about you?
It depends. The smaller the effects, the more of 'em.
That's what I meant.
That's just tools evolution - I don't think it really makes much difference in the fundamental principles. There's also a lot of hype and "thrash" in that marketplace/sphere. For example, the story of why OpenGL is because it's "assembly language for graphics cards". But the code snippets I've seen of it look like hex dumps - there's no 'narrative' to them. I don't have any cost data on what OpenGL costs in labor, but I bet it's horrendous.
Meanwhile, much other stuff is going hard the other way- like webby looking toolkits, where, if you know where all the bodies are buried, you can be extremely productive. But the tribal knowlege is immense.
And honestly - film movies still look better than digital movies, and most CGI isn't very graceful. Nobody's made an electronic movie that looks as good as "Ghandi" or "Lawrence of Arabia."
If that alludes to Hastings, then sure. But the count of those sorts of changes isn't all that large.
If nothing else, people's ability to adapt to change limits the number of changes that can be "digested." Why were machine guns applied so differently during World War I? Doesn't the advantage of high rate of fire make intuitive sense? So it costs more per gun and you have supply issues. Solve them - as we well know now.
Funny, a lot of people ( starting with James Burke) do that a whole, whole lot and it sure makes massive amounts of sense.
You seem to be saying 'history is impossible' and I don't agree. It just takes a very long time. I'm not sure that, for example, prior to Shelby Foote, how widely the Civil War was understood to be a lot about the Western , Transmissisippi battles. Used to be all about the battles in the East.
Ah but you do not seem to have done the basic comparison i asked you to do, let alone versus median age, GINI coefficient, of any of other mapped quality of life information. Japan and Taiwan are really well lit but have some very repressive aspects to their cultures (just like the US and much of Europe).
That's at present levels of state of the art. If anything, the number of people in prison is because there's a great many people employed in the shadow economy, people who are "surplus" and still have to live, somehow. The legal constraints on medical care is because the medical guilds don't operate very efficiently in policing their own ranks.
IOW, ambulance chasers seek part of the economic rent gained by medical practitioners in exchange for policing medical malpractice.
I think you're off by 80 years. There's been a mix of "artificial inefficiency" and relentless cost reduction for a long time now.
No. The 1% thing is an abstract, fictional figure - assume one of those magic wands Bones used to use on Star Trek being what passes for "surgery". Or something. Obviously, cost can only be driven down so far.
This process is underway, and has proceeded farther than most think. Think of the US. First 1% of the population is put in jail. Than 3% of the productive population is payed to put them there or keep them there. 1% of the population serves in health care, and 3% is busy defending the health care workers against legal threats. (Disclaimer: actual figures may be different, but you get the drift.)
Maybe the great "Crach" of 2009 will be remembered in history as the start of the era of "artificial inefficiency", the only way to keep an outdated economic model running for another decade or so.
And of course we don't need money to go around. If there are no bosses on my neck to force me to do my job in a bad fashion, I'd be glad to be one of the 1% to put in a days work for food, clothing and free health care.
If you are a good surgeon, would you quit your job because
99% of the population just lies on the beach? Or if you were Madonna, would you stop performing?
Groetjes Albert
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Albert van der Horst, UTRECHT,THE NETHERLANDS
Economic growth -- being exponential -- ultimately falters.
albert@spe&ar&c.xs4all.nl &=n http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst
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