Long range forecast
antipope.org
antipope.org
https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/steo/report/global_oil.cfm
The price of oil is probably unsustainable for all produceres at these levels. Either the price will have to increase or the number of producers will decrease.
I read somewhere that the Middle Eastern countries can continue at these levels for about 5 more years. My guess is that they will try to squeeze as many competitors out of the market as possible, increase demand, and scare off any potential future investments in competing energy producers (alternative or conventional) for the following decade.
[NB It is entirely possible I have been reading too much Robert Baer and watching too much Adam Curtis].
http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21685529-biggest-oil-all-saudi-arabia-considering-ipo-aramco-probably
The House of Saud is one of cards, and they know it. Their social contract is one of regular, large oil payments to citizens, not patriotism. This social contract will die when the money does, and so too will the nation. Money can paper over a broken society, but it won't build the sort of national unity you need for a successful nation state.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-28/saudi-arab...
And they already seem to have started issuing bonds:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-issues-bonds-worth-...
Maybe the Aramco thing is just part of this fire sale to try and prop everything up on the hope that, in the long term, a rise in oil prices will come to their rescue?
The oil producers with large reserves know that much of it is going to have to stay in the ground, so they are having a fire sale while they can.
It's very hard to pin 2015 weather anomalies on global warming. Confounding variables (ex: El Nino, and to what extend did GW cause the EL Nino) reign. But I think it's safe to speculate we've canceled the next ice age.
i think negative things really grab our attention once they're happening and we're feeling the immediate pain. i don't think negative things that will happen in the future sufficiently grab our attention (otherwise we wouldn't be running society this way - a way that dramatically limits our options a few decades down the line - would we?)
This may seem obvious, but it means that it's really hard for humans to step out of time and see events with the lens of history.
Our psychology, and the news panders to this, thinks that RIGHT NOW is the most crucial, important, serious of times of all times.
Every year we think that. It is not that every year things are getting progressively worse. Not at all. It's that we cannot see things for what they are. Objectively and relative to each other, without our present day emotions.
Thinking about how someone in the future will think of their present does not say anything about the facts around our present or future, but it speaks volumes about how humans perceive their present. Thus I would say that "resource consumption and environmental destruction issues, giant population, advanced weaponary and technology in general, the implications of a hyperconnected world" are making now as the most crucial of times. Rather they are things that happen, as usual which because we are living in the now we take for being the most crucial of all time.
We always look back 100 years ago and think "oh, they had it easy"
And "Oh, they had it easy" doesn't mean that life is progressively bad, from garden of eden to the present day, that would mean that 100 years from now it will be worse than it is now. No, what it means is that we are humans who don't usually have perspective.
I agree that if we are facing new challenges 100 years in the future, they will seem critical whereas the solved challenges of our present will appear solved and therefore not as challenging as they seemed at the time. This seems tautological.
I don't see how this is informative, or different from a platitude like "our problems don't seem so bad after we've solved them".
Thus, in 10 years time we will consider that Now to be more important than the now, well, now. And in 30 years time we will think that that now is more important than in 10 years or now. This invalidates this kind of present-ism. Now isn't any more or less important. It's probably, on the whole, less bad, less important, doing okay actually.
"The UK just had its wettest December ever, with more than double the normal rainfall and extensive floods taking out the centers of major cities."
is hyperbole, and doesn't help make the case.
This is not an immigration issue. This is failed state issue.
The evidence clearly shows that many of the perpetrators were not from Germany.
It surely is an immigration issue.
The rise in anti-immigrant sentiment throughout Europe is because Köln isn't an isolated case.
Köln-type incidents happen on a daily basis, but typically on a much smaller scale.
These small-scale incidents, which range from muggings to assaults to burglary to murder, combined with larger-scale incidents like Köln and Paris, put Europeans in a bad position.
Of course these Europeans will begin to question their past generosity!
Why should these Europeans continue to offer these foreigners so much kindness, aid and opportunity, only to have the foreigners commit various crimes against these Europeans?
Stross throws around terms like "racist clowns", "xenophobia", and "bigotry", yet that's exactly what we haven't seen from Europeans for so many decades now.
Europeans have been more than welcoming, and offered unselfish charity to so many foreigners.
Yet despite showing so much good will and kindness, Europeans have come to suffer as a result of their efforts to help others.
Any backlash that the foreigners face in Europe is because of how disgracefully so many of these foreigners have treated Europeans.
If you're curious about this aspect of European life, I would recommend a whirlwind tour of European capitals during the high summer, and make sure you stay up late. It doesn't make front page news typically, because it's regarded as normal - and many people avoid known problem areas at night accordingly. Britain in my experience is particularly bad, but the mix of alcohol, men, and late nights is rarely a good one. Parents, don't let your daughters grow up without self-defence lessons.
It's far from a new problem either:
I have a theory that when I read something like "you must read the following literature to understand what I am saying" it really means "what I am saying is based on faith - the beliefs of which you also must believe to take what I am saying as good". When I read this appeal, my defences go up.
For example in this essay:
> (Note: As usual, there's a lot of meat in the hyperlinks. You won't get the most out of this essay unless you are familiar with their content.)
It's saying "invest your time reading this selected literature and you too will understand my beliefs".
Is it just me or is this an accurate rule of thumb, this appeal to the necessary canon as indicating that the views are beliefs on faith rather than logic and rationality?
This doesn't directly address whether there is a difference between peoples beliefs being grounded in faith vs. logic, however. For that, I think that what you are really seeing is that in certain fields, like sciences, you can make complete arguments grounded in logic without referring to extensive outside information, or outside information that is beyond criticism. In arguments that are based on soft fields like social trends, you have to make arguments based on many examples and extrapolations. I think these arguments will necessarily seem more faith-based. The evidence in these fields is so wishy-washy, that everyone is essentially operating on faith, because there is usually not enough information to justify anyone's certainty.
The weather might be a extremely tiny part in the events, but the whole situation is the result of political-, clan-, ethnical- and religious struggles for power that's been going on for thousands of years, and fueled by empire building super powers the last 200 years.
The authors acknowledge that many factors led to Syria's uprising, including corrupt leadership, inequality, massive population growth, and the government's inability to curb human suffering.
But their report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, compiled statistics showing that water shortages in the Fertile Crescent in Syria, Iraq, and Turkey killed livestock, drove up food prices, sickened children, and forced 1.5 million rural residents to the outskirts of Syria's jam-packed cities—just as that country was exploding with immigrants from the Iraq war. (Related: "Half of Syrians Displaced: 5 Takeaways From New UN Report.")
I have little doubt that climate change has contributed to these changes over the thousands of years, but it's just one of many confounding factors that have led to the fertile crescent death spiral, one that I'd wager is relatively irrelevant (at least for now) when compared to everything else we humans have done in that region.
Actually, climate change has often been cited by academics as an underlying cause of conflict. Jared Diamond wrote an easily digestible book on this. (General climate change, not just the current issue.)
That being said his predictions for the world seem to be that things that are happening now will still be happening in the near future, which is a pretty safe bet.
Oil is a bit of scapegoat I think. All commodities are on basically all time lows. Value of real assets across the board has been generally plummeting.
Hard to know how much of this is proxy selling of the Chinese economy -- I suspect a bit; it's perhaps a plausible outcome for Chinese stocks to plunge much further and have commodities RALLY out of it on the unwind.
And his opinions on immigration are ridiculous. The first world has had very guarded borders for a long time. The trend is going in the opposite direction, with Europe becoming more sympathetic to immigrants and letting in tons of them.
The author wants completely open borders, and declares this is even a civil right. Which is totally impractical and would have huge negative consequences. The author accuses anyone of being against this as being racist or right wing. He suggests some kind of conspiracy theory by rich people opposing it. As if rich people don't benefit from immigration with cheaper labor.
Especially `Dont’ Restrict Immigration, Tax It' (http://openborders.info/driti/) is an interesting policy tool.
> A humanitarian could only say "These people are beneficial!" than he would immediately realize, "And Guatemala needs them more than us. Send them back." That has never happened.
An open border would result in a rapid and massive wave of immigrants, who would completely destroy the culture, politics, and economy of the home country.
An immigration tax could prevent that, but then it's not an open border. If the fee is high enough, poor immigrants and refugees would be left out. Otherwise it sounds like a much simpler and fair system than the current bureaucratic mess.
Thanks for the pointer to the previous discussion.
The immigrants would of course benefit economically, no one ever disputed that. But at the expense of the native population. Good luck earning a living wage when you are competing against the whole third world's population of laborers.
That's not even covering the immigrants using social services. You can't have any social programs at all, or every sick person who needs free health care can just move to your country. Or welfare benefits or whatever. Those programs can't work if the entire world's population can show up and take them.
> The point of the comment was saying that those immigrants don't benefit the country taking them. If having them is such a benefit, then sending them back should benefit their home country [...]
That's not at all clear. Also, we should probably look at benefits to persons (or humanity in general?) instead of countries.
The point of the comment was saying that those immigrants don't benefit the country taking them. If having them is such a benefit, then sending them back should benefit their home country, which it obviously doesn't.
> The immigrants would of course benefit economically, no one ever disputed that. But at the expense of the native population. Good luck earning a living wage when you are competing against the whole third world's population of laborers.
Actually, it's not at the expense of the native population. (Studies have shown that. The open borders people have the links.) In any case any negative impact could be compensated with taxes and redistribution.
Also, with free trade you already compete with the whole world in some sense.
> That's not even covering the immigrants using social services. You can't have any social programs at all, or every sick person who needs free health care can just move to your country. Or welfare benefits or whatever. Those programs can't work if the entire world's population can show up and take them.
Just restrict those specific uses. They cover that, too, on the website. See http://openborders.info/welfare-objection/
It's tragic that development stalled, but blaming some of the people who are most sympathetic to the nuclear power argument in the modern debate isn't really productive.
What spin can be placed on it? Germans imported "rape culture"--the real thing, not the feminist figment--by accepting into their country thousands of young, fighting-age, middle-eastern men who practice a religion that specifically permits them to take up to four wives and as many sex slaves as they like (Sura 4 from the Qur'an). Men who fetishize white women and who view them as mere sex objects to be claimed and possessed. Germany is now reaping the consequences that all but the most deluded leftist could have predicted.
And Stross's biggest concern is not for the safety of the women and girls of Europe, of his own nation, or even of his own family, but for the rise of far right politicians and parties. Guess what Charlie? If putting the far right in power is what it takes to prevent Cologne or Rotherham from happening to the women and girls I care about, then for me at least, the choice is a no-brainer. You've left us with no other option but to vote for the likes of UKIP, Trump, or worse.