- 3 Posts
- 35 Comments
4·2 months agoAnd they are fake flowers.
After four fall-offs, the process usually comes to a halt on its own?
Wine consultant Leon Deans said distillation could be a viable option to remove the oversupply, but may require government support because the cost of distilling the wine could be higher than the revenue from the ethanol.
If you consider that:
- cost of distilling bakes in the thermodynamic and energy costs of raising the temperatures of the wine to separate the alcohol
- the price for the pure alcohol is fungible with the market price of any other liquid fuel or alcohol on a per-energy equivalence
This seems like it’s a net energy negative process where the total amount of energy available to the society drops where you do this. This is exactly why it loses money.
Basically:
- you buy some energy some place
- wine producers take product they already made that has no market value and use the energy input to make something they can sell, using up that original energy
- the energy coming out is lower than what you started with in step 1, but you sell the energy for less money
- this loses energy AND money, but the government subsidies make the money side not a problem
This cuts wine makers in on the deal in a way where the market makes this feasible despite the underlying thermodynamic losses.
NOTE: the grapes and wine that were originally grown, the harvesting, bottling etc also have thermodynamic and material costs that are totally external to this analysis. The farm itself bought fuel when it made the wine, that’s all not ibcluddd into the ethanol calculus. When you consider the total investment with a wider boundary you can start to cost many additional resources like time, water, wages, insurance, financial interest and on and on.
- Comaps for driving / street navigation
- Caltopo for backcountry navigation (has offline maps)
- Trailforks for public recreation trails (hiking, mountain travel, mountain bike)
- Relief Maps for 3D landscape visualization / viewing
He called Trump the anti-Christ and evil.
This comes from a recent interview you can listen to here or read here.
The absolutely most interesting thing from this interview is not the hash smoking detail.
The part that is more important is that Carlson states early on in the interview that he feels that the American president was being blackmailed by Israel into engaging in the Iran war. Carlson basically comes out and implies that the president is compromised and manipulated and knows it, and he had no choice. He doesn’t specifically speculate on how they are controlling Trump. But he says that he’s shocked at the media failure to investigate this. Its really worth listening to this section of the interview. He met Trump 3X and deeply discussed Iran in the weeks before the fighting.
The only thing that comes immediately to mind is that Israel has the Epstein files and are threatening to release them. But it could be something else of course.
If shit properly hits the fan, I suspect things are going to be way more desperate.
To be a little more precise, people have studied this question carefully at a planetary scale.
The total agricultural production possible in the absense of artificial inputs like fertilizers, pesticides, diesel tractors, cold storage and refrigerated supply chains etc is around no more than 3billion people running off solar inputs and natures nutrient cycles and the amount of land and water available.
Pretty shocking number if you don’t have the context, but here is a place to get started on the information this is based on.
So for example, in the green revolution, land and agriculture technology increased a modest amount, but artificial fossil inputs into the existing technology system increased 90-fold. Most of the gains in food production are because it’s now based on fossil energy and nutrients rather than natural sources.
Currently, today ~40% of all the human food supply molecules come from fossil fuels and are incorporated into the plants and animals we eat.
So it’s not “just” a land management issue, or urbanization. Humanity is literally on artificial life support. There is no simple, survivable way out of this commitment. Fundamentally this is far, far from penciling out any other way we know how to survive. Humanity population passed some threshold for change around 3-4 generations ago.
In the collapse community people have been aware of a “thermodynamic” collapse of energy supplies for quite a while.
So for example, to mainstream people and the investors, there is something called ‘oil’ which seems like a commodity item.
In the collapse community, worldwide supplies of diesel and heavy oil energy products (shipping, trucking, agriculture, mining and gasoline refining among many other applications) has been in a 10-year long period of decline with major implications for our global civilization.
(Diesel / heavy crude comes from several places globally. The USA has run out but Venezuela and Iran are two heavy hitters for the molecules needed.)
The blockade on the strait is only having any impact because it’s a zero sum game now that nobody can raise production any higher. Like you don’t see Norway and Canada suddenly ramping up and filling demand, right?
I consider this the most parsimonious and cogent world view.
In a short summary: the blockade is an artificial shortage that is designed to collapse and bankrupt the most dependent and vulnerable nations in the global periphery, which is a “triage” that preserves oil supplies for the wealthy nations in the long run. Like this triggers collapse, and then as a second order effect global demand will fall for energy which is in an irreversible depletion event. This is the only way the most developed nations extend their existence through the crash.
This is all an open secret, you can dig into technical papers and agency reports and academic publications, everything will say the same thing. However, this is not really a “mainstream” consciousness.
1·6 months agoDefine: “Enshittification”.
You can’t watch Shakespeare and complain that it lacked a big car chase scene.
Hey, now that you mention it, that’s a huge problem. Who funded these scripts?
- What if the detective has an unusually keen sense of smell?
(Warning, watching this show is basically RickRolling yourself in a 1 hour format.)
1·6 months agoA few years ago in Canada there was a climate protest in Ottawa and all these protesters advanced on the nation’s capital.
The reigning prime minister Justin Trudeau joined the marchers and got to the front and got his photo taken for the news cycle.
That’s right, he was protesting himself! Nobody is accountable or in charge of anything.
Sometimes the mask comes off and you realize we could not be in this situation if there was any real leadership…
deleted by creator
Netflix hasn’t had anything I’ve wanted to watch in years
If they start the first season of dozens of new shows and then cancel the run immediately, would that change your opinion?
A lot of people have latched onto technology worship as a kind of secular religion, all with blind faith components.
Technology worship is a kind of “instrumental knowledge”. We end up having to use everything we know how to do. Nobody asks the question " why are we doing this?". The ability itself is an imperative.
There is an interesting technical point about human space flight and human ingenuity: if planet earth was 1.5X the current diameter, earth gravity would have been so great that the energy content of rocket fuels would not be dense enough to be able to lift itself to earth orbit. Putting this another way, it is a total fluke that humanity had A) fossil fuels and B) low enough gravity that space was actually possible to reach.
It gravity was just slightly higher we still would never have invented space flight, even now today. Its all just the ratio of fossil fuels to gravity cost being in our favor.
We were never smart, we were always just lucky. That’s the real lesson of space.
Does anyone remember this media story from about 10 years ago that was about recruiting people to go settle on planet Mars?
It is pretty interesting to think about what a remote habitat would logisitically need to operate a survivable environment for humans. For example, just think about the energy requirements being met WITHOUT fossil fuels. There in an infographic here about the conversions between a multiple reactor nuclear power plant and other technology, for example solar panels (3.1 million) or sports cars (2000). So imagine having digging and mining equipment, life support etc and suddenly you’re flying a nuclear reactor to Mars or flying millions of solar panels. We are so blind to the interconversions between fossil fuels and other energy sources that you don’t look at a bulldozer or backhoe or dump truck and really comprehend the stupendously insane amount of energy flowing.
NASA actually provides some numbers… It costs $100,000 per crew member per day if you’re only flying material (water and oxygen) to the moon. ( https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20230015110/downloads/Take or Make ASCEND charts.pdf)
Some people here do the napkin math on putting material onto Mars surface.
( https://www.reddit.com/r/Mars/comments/42rs7k/cost_per_pound_to_mars/). It seems like it’s about 5X more expensive.
Moving to Mars seems like a believable narrative. We’ve seen it on countless movies and TV series. People will wear spacesuits, drive rovers, live in a dome with a farming area, recycle water etc.
Then you start putting numbers on things and suddenly it seems absurd. Like a shovel is $200,000 etc.
Another huge factor is that this is the cost for one way trips. If you want to send a vehicle to Mars and then have it come back to planet earth, you have really have to take double the fuel on the trip. That means when you first launch from earth, your launch costs more than double, because you’re lifting fuel weight that doesn’t get burned off lowering the mass of the rocket…like, this is a major blind spot in a lot of the calculations. People are simple extending the costs to earth orbit but that’s not even close to the right values…
I think he said RENOUNCE victory?