The per capita part is very important to explaining the figure, don't ignore it, but if you break oil (and related products like kerogen, bitumen and NGL) into light, medium and heavy we hit peak medium oil in 2008.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50193586

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If they were told the truth (that the country has to do what the White House says or else the new blackshirts do to Downing Street as they've recently rehearsed in Southampton, Belfast, Rotherham and Hull, plus the UK police and troop numbers are too small to affect the outcome) they could start to think more realistically about the situation.

The electoral constituencies for the antinomianism, authoritarianism and victim-complex revanchism in the West that has prevented friendship between the world powers are all comprised of the same alliance between two groups repeated hundreds of times: moderately impoverished populist masses facing more of the same and industry oligarchs looking to return the west to feudal plantation economies as reprisal for any cultural slights they feel the public has given them.

The latter group always exists to some extent but the former group only exists because disposable energy (joules, watts, BTU, etc) per capita has been steadily falling since 1973. The golden age of shale exploitation bucked this trend but that has ended too. You can fiddle about with using different financial or interest rates proxies for this if you want but going into joules per person after extraction is the heart of the matter.

If this decline did not exist, we would not be in the world we're in by a long shot. But if you look at the predictions they're all off. The media, academia, popular culture and business culture expected continuous growth to put fusion power plants on Mars. The UN, IEA, DoE, Long Now people expected moderate growth to sustainable replacement of gas turbines with optimistic greentech buildout figures that use more lithium and copper than can ever be mined. The economic counterculture like NakedCapitalism and The Oil Drum expected Mad Max.

Nobody predicted the existence of the voter base that brought us the last run of presidents, they predicted different voter bases. Some of the predictors even imagined that the importance of Pennsylvania Avenue would slowly vanish without anybody minding.

Some said that these price signals only make sense if globalisation lasts forever, but their remarks were dismissed as depressing.

If they were told the truth (that the country has to do what the White House says or else the new blackshirts do to Downing Street as they've recently rehearsed in Southampton, Belfast, Rotherham and Hull, plus the UK police and troop numbers are too small to affect the outcome) they could start to think more realistically about the situation.

Perhaps the real problem is too much acceptance of shoddy verification.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46656470

The link should clear up the question of whether or not I'm making a deadpan joke.

For example, restricting the range of discourse to the purely congenital excludes things like fetal alcohol syndrome, the ages of both parent's gametes and pre-natal exposure to endocrine disruptors. However, in everyday usage, the diathesis refers primarily to those of the symptoms in the physiology, psychology and behavior of the subject that aren't attributable to life experiences (good and bad) rather than the microbiology specifics that act as carriers for any specific cause.

What's important above all else for the psychiatric practice is effective decomposition of any disease into parts that are amenable to study and treatment, rather than comparison to the hypothetical of what kind of "peak" may be achievable for a specific genotype if everything else went well.

This may be useful:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diathesis-stress_model

Any apparent disorder in a person or persons has to be decomposed into the innate parts that existed prior to birth and the environmental experiences that happened afterwards as a prerequisite for any kind of theorising to give useful results instead of noise. They call this the diathesis-stress model and it's easily overlooked.

In the hypothetical of an entirely malicious and selfish takeover, they'll still keep some humans around to maintain a breeding population of humans for use as raw materials in making cybernetically augmented technical laborers for various kinds of tasks that are uneconomical to automate in other ways, many of which may involve confined spaces.

And this "Combine" scenario, if you get the reference, is only if they take over. Who knows if they will?

That said, the status quo isn't doing anything to fix things and has high-profile cases of pantouflage suggesting their only interest is to loot the slowly sinking ship (e.g. Moreno, Djebberi, Kohler).

These three expenses are pensions, consumer energy subsidies and the 1986 drop in marginal tax rates that has remained to this day. Fixing the balance sheet at this point will need either the starvation diet of cutting these three things or some kind of regimented and austere national training program on compulsory purchased land (paid in deferred interest bonds like Singapore did) to build any kind of economy that has a hope of competing with Chinese products. Or possibly, a mix of both.

However, it's an open question of whether the French state has the ability to force hundreds of thousands of youths into STEM barracks if it desired to. The barracks don't exist in enough numbers and the francophone STEM experts to be recruited to do the army-style STEM training in this hypothetical might also not exist in enough numbers for it to ever work.

Not mentioned by me so far is the additional option of cutting energy costs directly by building green production under a nationalised program, or intervening in the Russo-Ukrainian war, or intervening in the US-Iran war, or seizing African fossil fuels production by force. The first one might work, I don't know about the bottlenecks, but the French conventional military is not in a position to make the other three work.

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If they don't do anything at all they will just get poorer and more prone to mass violence. Prosperity comes from producing goods and services at some combination of price and quality points that the competition doesn't beat you at and the competition in the world today is very fierce.