19 ms·

Human ingenuity + industriousness > Raw materials, even the most valuable one Even princes born with black gold will sooner or later be surpassed by organizati

Human ingenuity + industriousness > Raw materials, even the most valuable one Even princes born with black gold will sooner or later be surpassed by organizations run by inventors, scientists, and engineers. The values and abundance generated by hi-tech services are increasing while traditional energy sources are being supplanted by renewables. “The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.” -- Sheikh Zaki Yamani, a former Saudi oil minister.

hackuser 10y ago
Hmmm ... people controlling oil arguably have more power in the world, and possibly more wealth, than people controlling anything else.
- greedo 10y ago
  That control is tenuous. Do they control the oil, or does it control them? I can imagine numerous scenarios where control of the oil is taken away.
  - hackuser 10y ago
    I can see how that could happen, but the reality is that it doesn't. The people controlling oil today are almost all the same as the ones controlling it since 1979, Saddam Hussein being the big exception I can think of.
    - saryant 10y ago
      1979? American frackers didn't exist yet. North Sea production had only become significant a few years earlier (the Brent field was discovered in '71). Petrobras was irrelevant. Venezuela had nationalized its oil industry just three years prior. My point is, these things can change. Quickly.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      You can go back further than that. Gulf Oil was discovered in the 1930s. The current major oil-producing regions: Russia, the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, were all majors then. See Daniel Yergin's The Prize, or Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power. (Which is to say: I'm agreeing with your point and extending it.)
jseliger 10y ago
Yes. And this may be the most important part of the original article: Demand for oil will peak just before then, according to Royal Dutch Shell Plc projections, as alternative fuels and electric cars gain popularity, putting Middle East energy producers on shakier footing. The minute Tesla and others get electric vehicles to have sufficient range and low enough costs, we're going to see demand for oil go into structural decline. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13039490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13039490)
- mathattack 10y ago
  Yes. I suspect there will be an inflection point where it falls through the floor, as many countries who need the revenue will break from OPEC.
  - edblarney 10y ago
    OPEC does not exist anymore. There is no more real coordination. As a bloc it is basically defunct.
- 9q 10y ago
  To be fair there is still huge demand for oil outside consumer vehicles. Plastic, commercial oil use, energy production, cosmetics, etc. Oil has many uses beyond powering cars.
  - sgolestane 10y ago
    Per http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/fuels.aspx http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/fuels.aspx "70% of all oil consumed in the U.S. is used for transportation"
    - coredog64 10y ago
      Elon Musk isn't building an all electric version of the 787.
illys 10y ago
I subscribe! Besides, the world could become a better place the day the wahhabism oil-funding fades and vanishes. With global warming, these are the two most serious threats coming out of our oil-dependent economy.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- simonh 10y ago
  >Besides, the world could become a better place the day the wahhabism oil-funding fades and vanishes. Instability and collapse in Saudi Arabia or the wider Arab world would be good for nobody, even if it's inevitable. Lack of oil funds isn't going to make Wahabism go away or reduce the threat it poses, in fact IMHO quite the opposite. A triumphal raised finger in that direction is likely to get bitten off.
  - illys 10y ago
    I wish them to be busy working for a living and to have no money to waste abroad buying a place in heaven for their princes by building salafist or wahhabit mosques. I do not wish them to collapse as a country... Even if the transition from black-gold to hard working might be very difficult.
M_Grey 10y ago
I would be more inclined to believe that war is coming. Broad regional conflict will spread, fueled by failing puppet states like KSA that are going, not to only to fail, but messily implode.
- bogomipz 10y ago
  >"fueled by failing puppet states like KSA that are going" A puppet state implies that some other state is pulling the strings. Saudi Arabia is controlled by the House of Saud no?
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    Where would the Saudis be without the United States? I don't think "puppet state" is an accurate description, but their fate is heavily dependent on our mutual relationship.
    - astrodust 10y ago
      They're co-dependent, almost symbiotic. It's never clear who controls whom.
      - JumpCrisscross 10y ago
        > It's never clear who controls whom It's as clear as it gets. The United States guarantees the House of Saud'a rule in exchange for military and regional policy concessions. If the KSA quits, America can pull its security guarantee and the regime falls. If the United States quits, the KSA can...sell Treausries and stop selling us oil? The United States was 61% energy independent in 2013, with net energy imports falling [1]. We also import lots of oil from Mexico and Canada. The energy threat isn't existentially potent. Regarding Treasuries, the accounts could be frozen and sanctions levied. Again, power is asymmetric. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_energy_independence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_energy_indepen...
        10y ago
comboy 10y ago
IMHO on on the long run, the only valuable thing is information (I'm talking really long run, think multiplanetary). A bit too long to describe all aspects of it, but if you think it through I should become obvious. One of the aspects is that with enough technological progress energy should be abundant, so what's valuable is knowing how to apply it to get desirable results.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- tbabb 10y ago
  I don't know why you think energy will be free. It's a zero sum game that's built into the laws of the universe.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    There is a shit-ton of energy in the universe. It's one of the few things that's ridiculously abundant. Consider: We live on a ball of molten iron. Dig a deep enough hole and you get a nearly unlimited supply of thermal energy.
    - rgbrenner 10y ago
      Yes, but unless you're going to move your house to the bottom of that hole, someone is going to have to install and maintain the power lines to get that power to you. In that way it's very similar to oil.. no one has to pay to create the energy contained in oil, but they do have to pay to dig it up and distribute it. And yet, oil is not even close to being free. Edit: a better comparison would probably be hydro.. which also isnt free.
      - astrodust 10y ago
        I think you have a wobbly misunderstanding of physics. Iceland uses geothermal. They have it easy due to geological circumstances, but that's mostly a cost-saving measure. Any country can do the same. There's also geothermal systems for homes that cost far less that work by tapping the temperature differential in the ground: https://www.thisoldhouse.com/ideas/geothermal-heat-pump-how-it-works https://www.thisoldhouse.com/ideas/geothermal-heat-pump-how-... Oil is expensive because it's a scarce resource that requires a lot of effort to extract, process and transport.
bluedino 10y ago
A Sheikh in Dubai said 'My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Lamborghini, his son will drive a Lamborghini, but his son will ride a camel'.
- miles 10y ago
  http://www.gluckman.com/DubaiBiz.html http://www.gluckman.com/DubaiBiz.html "My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel," the Sheikh was fond of saying.
  - throwaway5752 10y ago
    "Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations" seems to have equivalent, independent expressions in many languages.
    - imron 10y ago
      富不过三代 (wealth doesn't last beyond 3 generations) is the Chinese.
      - 1024core 10y ago
        On the other hand: https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-families-in-florence-in-1427-are-still-the-richest-families-in-florence/ https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-families-in-florence-in-14...
        kamaal 10y ago
        You can definitely preserve and transfer wealth provided you are disciplined enough do certain things. Be careful to not reproduce in excess. This is the main thing. You don't want wealth to divide too rapidly between quick generations. Ensure you invest heavily in training people to teach them how to grow their wealth through age old tested ways: Gold, Real estate, well trained children. Ensure your accumulation rate is above your spending rate. Modern day trusts too come to mind. Kennedy's, Clinton's, Rockefeller's and Rothschild's of the world. Wealth doesn't last for long if you don't have the discipline for it. Most people who tend to lose wealth are generally the ones who completely lose a grip on reality. Deviate so far away from the very reasons that bought them there. Bad things happen from there on.
JohnJamesRambo 10y ago
But Apple is top because they make the shiniest most expensive trinket, I'm not sure that is that much more honorable or impressive.
- simonh 10y ago
  Smartphones are revolutionizing lives across the third world. The trickle-down of technology, design and engineering from the iPhone to other derivative modern smartphones is having a profoundly positive effect globally. https://qz.com/901357/selfies-are-great-but-smartphones-have-done-much-more-for-africa-says-harvard-professor-calestous-juma/ https://qz.com/901357/selfies-are-great-but-smartphones-have...
  - JohnJamesRambo 10y ago
    It isn't all great though. My friends are slowly being consumed by their phones.
JohnJamesRambo 10y ago
But Apple is top because they make the shiniest most expensive trinket, I'm not sure that is that much more honorable or impressive.
dredmorbius 10y ago
If that's your misbegotten model of reality, may I suggest some reading material. Technology is dependent on energy, not the other way 'round. Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History http://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-history/oclc/469280610 http://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-history/oclc/4... Smil's Energy Transitions addresses switching between primary sources of energy: http://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-transitions-history-requirements-prospects/oclc/820550029 http://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-transitions-history-req... Manfred Weissenbacher, Sources of Power, in two volumes: http://www.worldcat.org/title/before-oil-the-ages-of-foraging-agriculture-and-coal/oclc/837625798 http://www.worldcat.org/title/before-oil-the-ages-of-foragin... http://www.worldcat.org/title/oil-age-and-beyond/oclc/837625970 http://www.worldcat.org/title/oil-age-and-beyond/oclc/837625... Limits to Growth is the old classic: http://www.worldcat.org/title/limits-to-growth/oclc/705515203 http://www.worldcat.org/title/limits-to-growth/oclc/70551520... The 30 year update: http://www.worldcat.org/title/limits-to-growth-the-30-year-update/oclc/894238846 http://www.worldcat.org/title/limits-to-growth-the-30-year-u... For a view of the political and social realities of addressing limits, I can't recommend William Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity highly enough. http://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-scarcity-revisited-the-unraveling-of-the-american-dream/oclc/25026105 http://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-sc... Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, spells out the more general dynamic. http://www.worldcat.org/title/collapse-of-complex-societies/oclc/857248243 http://www.worldcat.org/title/collapse-of-complex-societies/...
- seizethecheese 10y ago
  How condescending. Surely technology is dependent on energy, but also energy is dependent on technology (fracking being one example.) They are coevolutionary.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Sure, there's some mutual feedback. But it always approaches some theoretical limit. Oil, for example, has been utilised since prehistoric times, around the world. The Chinese had massive gasworks, and in fact pioneered the drilling methods utilised by Colonel Drake in Titusville, PA. They'd achieved depths of 1300 meters using little more than bamboo and some wrought iron. Drake had iron pipe and steam power for his drilling and pumping. Titusville and the Pennsylvania oil boom required a massive transportation infrastructure -- barrels on mulecart only got you so far. By the mid-1867s, railcars not much different from today's DOT-111 were in use, as well as steel pipelines. The thing is that steam engines, railroads, tank cars, and steel, all themselves require energy, mostly in the form of coal for transport, refining, and smelting iron and steel. The Bessemer furnace (1856) produced the first high-quality metalurgical steel -- earlier iron was hard, but brittle, and construction based on it (rails, boilers, pistons) had a strong tendency to go their separate ways. What's simply staggering, to me, is how quickly what we consider to be "modernity" emerged with the increased use of coal, oil, and gas. By the 1880s, most of the fundamentals of the modern world were here: reciprocating engines, the first turbines, skyscrapers, the first automobiles, electric lights and motors, basic coal-tar (and early petroleum) chemistry, and the beginnings of telecommunications and information technology (telegraph, telephone, punch card tabulators). There's an exceptionally strong argument that the modern world was invented between 1875 and 1925 -- there are a small handful of exceptions (lasers, nuclear fission, television, transistors (though vacuum tube valves pressaged them), MRIs, and gas turbines). Pretty much anything else you can conceive of existed, in at least rudimentary form. You can spend your energies being insulted, or dig into a set of curated works which spell this out. Of the books, I'd strongly recommend Smil's "History" and Ophul's "Scarcity" as getting to the heart of the argument. Smil in particular makes the "approaches a limit" argument in repeated semi-log plots of energy usage growth (and efficiency) throughout his book. Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth combines exceptionally good history with middling-to-bad economics to cover the US experience, 1870 - 2015, which he divides into three roughly 50-year spans. I recommend that book highly for the history as well (though somewhat less so for economics). http://aoghs.org/transportation/densmore-oil-tank-car/ http://aoghs.org/transportation/densmore-oil-tank-car/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT-111_tank_car https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT-111_tank_car
overcast 10y ago
-- Michael Scott.
rsync 10y ago
"Even princes born with black gold will sooner or later be surpassed by organizations run by inventors, scientists, and engineers." Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtcaIA9SU7o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtcaIA9SU7o Relevant portion is 0 - 1:20.
rudrigu 10y ago
You're living in a fantasy world in which people you admire matter. Try to make fertilizers out of "hi-tech services". Try to eat "renewables". Inventors, scientists and engineers haven't really mattered much since WWII and the Cold War.
- simonh 10y ago
  > Inventors, scientists and engineers haven't really mattered much since WWII and the Cold War. What has mattered more? The only reason oil is valuable is because it powers our technology. The contribution of agriculture to global GDP is about 4%. Yes you can't eat a smartphone but absolutely anybody sound in mind and body can grow food. Not so many can design smartphones. And they do matter[0]. [0] https://qz.com/901357/selfies-are-great-but-smartphones-have-done-much-more-for-africa-says-harvard-professor-calestous-juma/ https://qz.com/901357/selfies-are-great-but-smartphones-have...
  - rudrigu 10y ago
    Quoting Samuelson, if a man marries his maid, the GDP goes down. That is how smart GDP-based arguments are. Wait until the population gets close to the carrying capacity again, and let's see how your GDP argument holds. Perhaps you only know tech oligarchs. But if you look at the list of billionaires, you find also mining oligarchs and fossil fuel oligarchs. So much for the argument that raw materials do not matter... Physicists invented nuclear racketeering, which made them celebrities in the 1940s and 1950s. We live in the age of the MBA, not in the age of the scientist. That golden age is gone, unfortunately.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    It's surprisingly difficult to grow food at the rate of 8.5 tonnes per hectare (Belgium) without petroleum-fueled water pumps, tractors, and harvesters, natural-gas based ammonia fertiliser, fossil-fuel-obtained potash and phosphate, fossil-fuel-based pesticides. Or water and arable land. Take all that away and you're Zimbabwe, with 0.3 tonnes. Humans already command or control some 25-40% of all primary plant production (NPP, or the photosynthetic ceiling), much of that made possible through modern mechanised architecture. In the works already mentioned (Smil, Weissenbacher), the immense increases in ag productivity through such advances as assisted irrigation, mechanised plows, disks, seed drills, fertiliser, harvesters, etc., etc., are addressed in detail. GDP, and economic prices generally, are exceptionally poor measures of net contribution and value. (Or of true real costs.) Northwestern University economist Joel Mokyr, otherwise quite a technological optimist, discusses the failure of GDP to capture the true impacts of, say, antibiotics or vaccines. Their price-based contributions to GDP are de minimus, but their impacts on overall well-being are tremendous. http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Agriculture/Cereal-yield/Kg-per-hectare http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Agriculture/C...
fuzzfactor 10y ago
Human ingenuity needs raw materials to execute industriousness upon. And if the industriousness does not add enough value to the raw materials, then the financial return from the industriousness will not exceed that from the raw materials alone. Most new ventures rely entirely on simple trading, profiting (subtracting wealth) without adding any value. Other than trading the raw materials themselves, these ventures could not thrive unless someone else already had added some value to some raw materals so there would be someone other than commodity owners to sell to. Plus if a raw material can not be commoditized, there will not be enough to go around. As valuable commodities go, fuels by definition have always been cheap enough to burn, the value lies with the enormous quantity in essential commerce.
Bombthecat 10y ago
Aren't they buying high tech firms left and right? Like uber? When I think about it. Is the culture there linked to the investors? Just food for thought.

hackuser 10y ago

Hmmm ... people controlling oil arguably have more power in the world, and possibly more wealth, than people controlling anything else.

greedo 10y ago
That control is tenuous. Do they control the oil, or does it control them? I can imagine numerous scenarios where control of the oil is taken away.
- hackuser 10y ago
  I can see how that could happen, but the reality is that it doesn't. The people controlling oil today are almost all the same as the ones controlling it since 1979, Saddam Hussein being the big exception I can think of.
  - saryant 10y ago
    1979? American frackers didn't exist yet. North Sea production had only become significant a few years earlier (the Brent field was discovered in '71). Petrobras was irrelevant. Venezuela had nationalized its oil industry just three years prior. My point is, these things can change. Quickly.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    You can go back further than that. Gulf Oil was discovered in the 1930s. The current major oil-producing regions: Russia, the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, were all majors then. See Daniel Yergin's The Prize, or Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power. (Which is to say: I'm agreeing with your point and extending it.)

jseliger 10y ago

Yes. And this may be the most important part of the original article: Demand for oil will peak just before then, according to Royal Dutch Shell Plc projections, as alternative fuels and electric cars gain popularity, putting Middle East energy producers on shakier footing. The minute Tesla and others get electric vehicles to have sufficient range and low enough costs, we're going to see demand for oil go into structural decline. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13039490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13039490)

mathattack 10y ago
Yes. I suspect there will be an inflection point where it falls through the floor, as many countries who need the revenue will break from OPEC.
- edblarney 10y ago
  OPEC does not exist anymore. There is no more real coordination. As a bloc it is basically defunct.
9q 10y ago
To be fair there is still huge demand for oil outside consumer vehicles. Plastic, commercial oil use, energy production, cosmetics, etc. Oil has many uses beyond powering cars.
- sgolestane 10y ago
  Per http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/fuels.aspx http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/fuels.aspx "70% of all oil consumed in the U.S. is used for transportation"
  - coredog64 10y ago
    Elon Musk isn't building an all electric version of the 787.

illys 10y ago

I subscribe! Besides, the world could become a better place the day the wahhabism oil-funding fades and vanishes. With global warming, these are the two most serious threats coming out of our oil-dependent economy.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
simonh 10y ago
>Besides, the world could become a better place the day the wahhabism oil-funding fades and vanishes. Instability and collapse in Saudi Arabia or the wider Arab world would be good for nobody, even if it's inevitable. Lack of oil funds isn't going to make Wahabism go away or reduce the threat it poses, in fact IMHO quite the opposite. A triumphal raised finger in that direction is likely to get bitten off.
- illys 10y ago
  I wish them to be busy working for a living and to have no money to waste abroad buying a place in heaven for their princes by building salafist or wahhabit mosques. I do not wish them to collapse as a country... Even if the transition from black-gold to hard working might be very difficult.

M_Grey 10y ago

I would be more inclined to believe that war is coming. Broad regional conflict will spread, fueled by failing puppet states like KSA that are going, not to only to fail, but messily implode.

bogomipz 10y ago
>"fueled by failing puppet states like KSA that are going" A puppet state implies that some other state is pulling the strings. Saudi Arabia is controlled by the House of Saud no?
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Where would the Saudis be without the United States? I don't think "puppet state" is an accurate description, but their fate is heavily dependent on our mutual relationship.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    They're co-dependent, almost symbiotic. It's never clear who controls whom.
    - JumpCrisscross 10y ago
      > It's never clear who controls whom It's as clear as it gets. The United States guarantees the House of Saud'a rule in exchange for military and regional policy concessions. If the KSA quits, America can pull its security guarantee and the regime falls. If the United States quits, the KSA can...sell Treausries and stop selling us oil? The United States was 61% energy independent in 2013, with net energy imports falling [1]. We also import lots of oil from Mexico and Canada. The energy threat isn't existentially potent. Regarding Treasuries, the accounts could be frozen and sanctions levied. Again, power is asymmetric. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_energy_independence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_energy_indepen...
      - 10y ago

comboy 10y ago

IMHO on on the long run, the only valuable thing is information (I'm talking really long run, think multiplanetary). A bit too long to describe all aspects of it, but if you think it through I should become obvious. One of the aspects is that with enough technological progress energy should be abundant, so what's valuable is knowing how to apply it to get desirable results.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
tbabb 10y ago
I don't know why you think energy will be free. It's a zero sum game that's built into the laws of the universe.
- astrodust 10y ago
  There is a shit-ton of energy in the universe. It's one of the few things that's ridiculously abundant. Consider: We live on a ball of molten iron. Dig a deep enough hole and you get a nearly unlimited supply of thermal energy.
  - rgbrenner 10y ago
    Yes, but unless you're going to move your house to the bottom of that hole, someone is going to have to install and maintain the power lines to get that power to you. In that way it's very similar to oil.. no one has to pay to create the energy contained in oil, but they do have to pay to dig it up and distribute it. And yet, oil is not even close to being free. Edit: a better comparison would probably be hydro.. which also isnt free.
    - astrodust 10y ago
      I think you have a wobbly misunderstanding of physics. Iceland uses geothermal. They have it easy due to geological circumstances, but that's mostly a cost-saving measure. Any country can do the same. There's also geothermal systems for homes that cost far less that work by tapping the temperature differential in the ground: https://www.thisoldhouse.com/ideas/geothermal-heat-pump-how-it-works https://www.thisoldhouse.com/ideas/geothermal-heat-pump-how-... Oil is expensive because it's a scarce resource that requires a lot of effort to extract, process and transport.

bluedino 10y ago

A Sheikh in Dubai said 'My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Lamborghini, his son will drive a Lamborghini, but his son will ride a camel'.

miles 10y ago
http://www.gluckman.com/DubaiBiz.html http://www.gluckman.com/DubaiBiz.html "My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel," the Sheikh was fond of saying.
- throwaway5752 10y ago
  "Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations" seems to have equivalent, independent expressions in many languages.
  - imron 10y ago
    富不过三代 (wealth doesn't last beyond 3 generations) is the Chinese.
    - 1024core 10y ago
      On the other hand: https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-families-in-florence-in-1427-are-still-the-richest-families-in-florence/ https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-families-in-florence-in-14...
      - kamaal 10y ago
        You can definitely preserve and transfer wealth provided you are disciplined enough do certain things. Be careful to not reproduce in excess. This is the main thing. You don't want wealth to divide too rapidly between quick generations. Ensure you invest heavily in training people to teach them how to grow their wealth through age old tested ways: Gold, Real estate, well trained children. Ensure your accumulation rate is above your spending rate. Modern day trusts too come to mind. Kennedy's, Clinton's, Rockefeller's and Rothschild's of the world. Wealth doesn't last for long if you don't have the discipline for it. Most people who tend to lose wealth are generally the ones who completely lose a grip on reality. Deviate so far away from the very reasons that bought them there. Bad things happen from there on.

JohnJamesRambo 10y ago

But Apple is top because they make the shiniest most expensive trinket, I'm not sure that is that much more honorable or impressive.

simonh 10y ago
Smartphones are revolutionizing lives across the third world. The trickle-down of technology, design and engineering from the iPhone to other derivative modern smartphones is having a profoundly positive effect globally. https://qz.com/901357/selfies-are-great-but-smartphones-have-done-much-more-for-africa-says-harvard-professor-calestous-juma/ https://qz.com/901357/selfies-are-great-but-smartphones-have...
- JohnJamesRambo 10y ago
  It isn't all great though. My friends are slowly being consumed by their phones.

JohnJamesRambo 10y ago

But Apple is top because they make the shiniest most expensive trinket, I'm not sure that is that much more honorable or impressive.

dredmorbius 10y ago

If that's your misbegotten model of reality, may I suggest some reading material. Technology is dependent on energy, not the other way 'round. Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History http://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-history/oclc/469280610 http://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-history/oclc/4... Smil's Energy Transitions addresses switching between primary sources of energy: http://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-transitions-history-requirements-prospects/oclc/820550029 http://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-transitions-history-req... Manfred Weissenbacher, Sources of Power, in two volumes: http://www.worldcat.org/title/before-oil-the-ages-of-foraging-agriculture-and-coal/oclc/837625798 http://www.worldcat.org/title/before-oil-the-ages-of-foragin... http://www.worldcat.org/title/oil-age-and-beyond/oclc/837625970 http://www.worldcat.org/title/oil-age-and-beyond/oclc/837625... Limits to Growth is the old classic: http://www.worldcat.org/title/limits-to-growth/oclc/705515203 http://www.worldcat.org/title/limits-to-growth/oclc/70551520... The 30 year update: http://www.worldcat.org/title/limits-to-growth-the-30-year-update/oclc/894238846 http://www.worldcat.org/title/limits-to-growth-the-30-year-u... For a view of the political and social realities of addressing limits, I can't recommend William Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity highly enough. http://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-scarcity-revisited-the-unraveling-of-the-american-dream/oclc/25026105 http://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-sc... Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, spells out the more general dynamic. http://www.worldcat.org/title/collapse-of-complex-societies/oclc/857248243 http://www.worldcat.org/title/collapse-of-complex-societies/...

seizethecheese 10y ago
How condescending. Surely technology is dependent on energy, but also energy is dependent on technology (fracking being one example.) They are coevolutionary.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Sure, there's some mutual feedback. But it always approaches some theoretical limit. Oil, for example, has been utilised since prehistoric times, around the world. The Chinese had massive gasworks, and in fact pioneered the drilling methods utilised by Colonel Drake in Titusville, PA. They'd achieved depths of 1300 meters using little more than bamboo and some wrought iron. Drake had iron pipe and steam power for his drilling and pumping. Titusville and the Pennsylvania oil boom required a massive transportation infrastructure -- barrels on mulecart only got you so far. By the mid-1867s, railcars not much different from today's DOT-111 were in use, as well as steel pipelines. The thing is that steam engines, railroads, tank cars, and steel, all themselves require energy, mostly in the form of coal for transport, refining, and smelting iron and steel. The Bessemer furnace (1856) produced the first high-quality metalurgical steel -- earlier iron was hard, but brittle, and construction based on it (rails, boilers, pistons) had a strong tendency to go their separate ways. What's simply staggering, to me, is how quickly what we consider to be "modernity" emerged with the increased use of coal, oil, and gas. By the 1880s, most of the fundamentals of the modern world were here: reciprocating engines, the first turbines, skyscrapers, the first automobiles, electric lights and motors, basic coal-tar (and early petroleum) chemistry, and the beginnings of telecommunications and information technology (telegraph, telephone, punch card tabulators). There's an exceptionally strong argument that the modern world was invented between 1875 and 1925 -- there are a small handful of exceptions (lasers, nuclear fission, television, transistors (though vacuum tube valves pressaged them), MRIs, and gas turbines). Pretty much anything else you can conceive of existed, in at least rudimentary form. You can spend your energies being insulted, or dig into a set of curated works which spell this out. Of the books, I'd strongly recommend Smil's "History" and Ophul's "Scarcity" as getting to the heart of the argument. Smil in particular makes the "approaches a limit" argument in repeated semi-log plots of energy usage growth (and efficiency) throughout his book. Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth combines exceptionally good history with middling-to-bad economics to cover the US experience, 1870 - 2015, which he divides into three roughly 50-year spans. I recommend that book highly for the history as well (though somewhat less so for economics). http://aoghs.org/transportation/densmore-oil-tank-car/ http://aoghs.org/transportation/densmore-oil-tank-car/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT-111_tank_car https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT-111_tank_car

overcast 10y ago

-- Michael Scott.

rsync 10y ago

"Even princes born with black gold will sooner or later be surpassed by organizations run by inventors, scientists, and engineers." Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtcaIA9SU7o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtcaIA9SU7o Relevant portion is 0 - 1:20.

rudrigu 10y ago

You're living in a fantasy world in which people you admire matter. Try to make fertilizers out of "hi-tech services". Try to eat "renewables". Inventors, scientists and engineers haven't really mattered much since WWII and the Cold War.

simonh 10y ago
> Inventors, scientists and engineers haven't really mattered much since WWII and the Cold War. What has mattered more? The only reason oil is valuable is because it powers our technology. The contribution of agriculture to global GDP is about 4%. Yes you can't eat a smartphone but absolutely anybody sound in mind and body can grow food. Not so many can design smartphones. And they do matter[0]. [0] https://qz.com/901357/selfies-are-great-but-smartphones-have-done-much-more-for-africa-says-harvard-professor-calestous-juma/ https://qz.com/901357/selfies-are-great-but-smartphones-have...
- rudrigu 10y ago
  Quoting Samuelson, if a man marries his maid, the GDP goes down. That is how smart GDP-based arguments are. Wait until the population gets close to the carrying capacity again, and let's see how your GDP argument holds. Perhaps you only know tech oligarchs. But if you look at the list of billionaires, you find also mining oligarchs and fossil fuel oligarchs. So much for the argument that raw materials do not matter... Physicists invented nuclear racketeering, which made them celebrities in the 1940s and 1950s. We live in the age of the MBA, not in the age of the scientist. That golden age is gone, unfortunately.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  It's surprisingly difficult to grow food at the rate of 8.5 tonnes per hectare (Belgium) without petroleum-fueled water pumps, tractors, and harvesters, natural-gas based ammonia fertiliser, fossil-fuel-obtained potash and phosphate, fossil-fuel-based pesticides. Or water and arable land. Take all that away and you're Zimbabwe, with 0.3 tonnes. Humans already command or control some 25-40% of all primary plant production (NPP, or the photosynthetic ceiling), much of that made possible through modern mechanised architecture. In the works already mentioned (Smil, Weissenbacher), the immense increases in ag productivity through such advances as assisted irrigation, mechanised plows, disks, seed drills, fertiliser, harvesters, etc., etc., are addressed in detail. GDP, and economic prices generally, are exceptionally poor measures of net contribution and value. (Or of true real costs.) Northwestern University economist Joel Mokyr, otherwise quite a technological optimist, discusses the failure of GDP to capture the true impacts of, say, antibiotics or vaccines. Their price-based contributions to GDP are de minimus, but their impacts on overall well-being are tremendous. http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Agriculture/Cereal-yield/Kg-per-hectare http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Agriculture/C...

fuzzfactor 10y ago

Human ingenuity needs raw materials to execute industriousness upon. And if the industriousness does not add enough value to the raw materials, then the financial return from the industriousness will not exceed that from the raw materials alone. Most new ventures rely entirely on simple trading, profiting (subtracting wealth) without adding any value. Other than trading the raw materials themselves, these ventures could not thrive unless someone else already had added some value to some raw materals so there would be someone other than commodity owners to sell to. Plus if a raw material can not be commoditized, there will not be enough to go around. As valuable commodities go, fuels by definition have always been cheap enough to burn, the value lies with the enormous quantity in essential commerce.

Bombthecat 10y ago

Aren't they buying high tech firms left and right? Like uber? When I think about it. Is the culture there linked to the investors? Just food for thought.