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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • A year ago I was reading a bunch of papers on biofortification via plant breeding and there was some really interesting info about just how many people can be shifted from inadequate to adequate intake of some nutrients just by breeding in things like higher levels of lysine, zinc, iron, beta carotene, etc… into staple crops. In places like india and africa just replacing a handful of crops with improved varieties can shift hundreds of millions of people out of deficiency ranges that cause permanent cognitive and physical stunting/disability.

    Overtime as trace mineral depletion continues in global cropland and as CO2 levels reduce nutrient density of crops purposeful breeding programs and soil repletion will be necessary to have decent health of previous generations


  • Down in Texas on gulf coast area, my friends panic buying a house but the mortgage is impossible unless the house is fully insured until it is paid off, the snag is that of all the insurers they called none would insure houses in this location and the house they are buying is not in flood zone and is not adjacent to any water. Big insurance is just straight abandoning huge areas and letting current policies fall off and not renewing


  • yeah investment will continue and they will extend this timeline but we find less and less which is more costly to extract. The real shock of this is just that the situation is very dire very quickly if the pace cannot keep up. If you consider that investment could cease substantially due to financial issues or the fact that high oil prices may not be sustainable. How fast this collapse can happens if something goes wrong is really the reason i posted this. the decline can be so fierce it would be a huge stagflationary trigger which is how most people will experience this.

    Previously, I remember you saying that the average person will start to feel very affected by the energy crunch starting sometime in the 2030’s and that the level of collapse will continue to increase for maybe a few decades after that.

    I was probably talking about total energy including natural gas, because natural gas peak estimates come in around 2034, after that its crucial we have built out alternatives sufficiently to at least put a floor beneath us in terms of electrical generation. Its still possible we can get enough build out to at least keep functioning as depletion kicks in but we are currently not aggressive enough with installing renewable or nuclear capacity.


  • Our Outlook reflects oil production naturally declining at a rate of about 15% per year. That’s nearly double the IEA’s prior estimates of about 8%. This increase is the result of the world’s shifting energy mix toward “unconventional” sources of oil and natural gas. These are mostly shale and dense rock formations where oil and gas production typically declines faster. To put it in concrete terms: With no new investment, global oil supplies would fall by more than 15 million barrels per day in the first year alone. At that rate, by 2030, oil supplies would fall from 100 million barrels per day to less than 30 million – that’s 70 million barrels short of what’s needed to meet demand every day.

    The world would experience severe energy shortages and disruption to daily lives within a year of investment ceasing. Given price responses to past oil supply shocks, the permanent loss of 15% of oil supply per year could raise oil prices by more than 400%. By comparison, prices rose 200% during the oil price shocks of the 1970s. Within 10 years, unemployment rates would likely reach 30%. That’s higher than during the Great Depression of the 1930s.




  • maketotaldestr0iMtoCollapseThe Productivity Trap
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    2 months ago

    given that Edo era Japan did not have biofuels

    Wood is biofuel.

    to summarize in a different way the arguments of the person you are debating with i would say just look around you, how much have we weaned from fossil fuels.

    in 1993 the sum of nuclear and renewables in our global energy mix was 14%, 30 years later in 2023 it is 18.5%. our total energy usage is massively higher and fossil fuel use is massively higher over those 30 years.

    Its too little too late scenario. Sure its technically possible we could replace FFs with renewables and nuclear but thats not where we are at yet or in the next 50 years at this pace. Now depending on what you think the depletion curve of FFs looks like will tell you if it will be possible or not. the data doesnt look good for a smooth transition. At best the scenario is a severe bottleneck unless we pull some unprecedented exponential changes in renewable and nuclear deployment.




  • I stayed in lousiana near the gulf for a while and passed through there a few times over the past 5 years. Its incredible how much of the stuff never rebuilt, not just from katrina but all the damage since in multiple cities just entire areas where 60% of the houses have blue tarps on the roofs and knocked over trees and collapsed sheds/fences never dealt with. It gets noticeably worse each time i pass through. It is not all just the poorest areas either, its areas where you would think people would have insurance coverage but at this point insurance is falling into “discretionary” spending category as people need to just buy necessities and hope for the best. there are parts that look like post-collapse movie or something where people just do whatever makeshift ghetto rigged patches and stay.








  • There’s a lot I don’t like about electric vehicles: it’s a bandaid solution to what replacing suburban sprawl with walkable and bikable cities would actually fix, but it would still shift some of the transportation emissions into the electricity generation category which we seem to want to tackle.

    electric bikes and mixed zoning could make a huge efficiency change for the west. a few solar panels are enough to charge electric bikes at the household level. I wish some economist would look at how much percent of all fossil fuel dependent commuting could be eliminated with this combo





  • maketotaldestr0iOPMtoCollapseThe Coming Great Conflict
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    4 months ago

    yeah lol. i mean elizabeth warren is a vicious neoliberal authoritarian cunt but she has no political power or support. but bernie and aoc are both moderate principled politicians for the most part.

    For a better take on what dalios saying better to read peter turchin and avoid the billionaire capitalist cockamamie version





  • maketotaldestr0iOPMtoCollapseThe Great American Poisoning
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    4 months ago

    So basically you are poopooing an article you didnt read because you got bothered by one decontextualized pull quote.

    “The article might have been well-informed and factual, but starting with such an absurd premise, I couldn’t maintain interest long enough to find out.”

    why bother commenting if you haven’t read it or even knowing if the “absurd premise” is even in fact a premise required to support the rest of the thing?