ROFl, 2012 hasn't happened yet either lol. Not that I believe in that crap or anything.
Modernization cannot continue
- Thread starter darksidZz
- Start date
ROFl, 2012 hasn't happened yet either lol. Not that I believe in that crap or anything.
I disagree with the premise of this thread, it could continue, its just a matter of us managing to switch to a more sustainable power supply, the energy is available an so technically is the technology, but the infrastructure that is the problem! Making a new power infrastructure from power sources to users is titanic undertaking. Thus the question is can we change rapidly enough?
Decentralization is the key. Each person/small town has their own equipment to make all the power they need (solar, wind, hydro, water wheel, ext...). Then you don't have to ship it cross country.
Sure localized grid storage and privately own micro-power plants of the roof top solar kind does make sense, but grid networking also make sense in conjunction. At present our power grid is designed such as there are few centralized power sources that distribute to clients and that in many cases they can't share clients, if we decentralized the grid making clients both takers and producers dependent on time of day and weather we also want to make it so that some clients which are in production says windmills in the great lakes and ship their excess power far to say new york on a cloudy day, in short we still want to share power and the necessity to store and share the power is greater with intermittent renewables.
Say for example Egypt in 2030 is making a lot of solar power, it would be cheapest for it to pump it across a HVDC line to europe and sell it directly to europe, it would be more efficient and cheaper then say making hydrogen or using some other transportable energy system.
So yes we need to decentralized away from the centralized power stations and client model to a client and power source a one model, but we also want to connect these clients together to share power and negate the intermittent nature of their power sources and weaknesses of thier power portfolios, creating a power network that is very alien from the existing one.
In some ways the existing grid design can be easily modified into as smart grid, in other ways its going to have to be rebuild from the the ground up. As is the existing grid could withstand 15-30% intermittent renewable by switching off peaking stations when renewable are low. Electric cars can take up off-peak power from baseline power plants and latter could take up the extra power when renewables are high, and eventually when battery capacity is cheap enough act as grid storage devices, you might rent your electric cars battery out and say give X% of its capacity to the power company in exchange for reduce billing or even payment. Of course that is depend on large cheap battery capacity and a smart girding system, but it makes for the most achievable infrastructure models we could implement in the coming years.
So again its possible we can survive peak oil and continue to grow, the technology does exist its just a matter of making the infrastructure and effort, which at this time we seem to be doing with the same kind of enthusiasm as a man who is being forced to fuck an elephant.
The amount if change we need verse the amount actually being achieved is completely inadequate, so I agree if things continue on this pace we will be in for some very tough times for maybe decades to come.
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I thought it was supposed to end in 2012?
It's not that the world "is going to end". However, the American standard of living is going to be severely reduced and opportunity for advancement greatly limited.
I can't really keep up with all the predictions. There was that preacher guy who was telling us it was going to end in 2011, an ancient calendar says it will end in 2012, people are saying the world will end due to running out of oil, liberalism, climate change, terrorism etc. But it never really seems to.
It will change of course; some things will be better, some worse. It's been that way for the past 200 years. Women's rights are on the rise! But many women no longer have the economic freedom to work or not work any more. Electric power for all! But 20,000 Americans are dying every year from coal power pollution. Antibiotics and better sanitation! But we're creating multi-drug resistant killer germs.
In the future we'll have less cheap energy overall, but will be able to do a lot more with it. My phone has more computer power than any computer existing in the 1960's and uses a millionth the power. My car gets 50 miles per gallon and does its job as well as my 15mpg Plymouth Volare I had when I was a kid.
For oil company executives - agreed. For alternative energy engineers - there will be a lot more.
People working in the hightech fields are (more than likely) going to do well for themselves. Or so I'd think. BUT, they're not immune to outsourcing. How many engineers does China produce every year? Biochemists? PhDs? I read in TIME yesterday that the USA has had negative growth in regards to innovative entrepreneurial companies since the 1980s. One explanation was that the financial sector has sucked up a lot of this talent into WallStreet/Banking.
Sure localized grid storage and privately own micro-power plants of the roof top solar kind does make sense, but grid networking also make sense in conjunction. At present our power grid is designed such as there are few centralized power sources that distribute to clients and that in many cases they can't share clients, if we decentralized the grid making clients both takers and producers dependent on time of day and weather we also want to make it so that some clients which are in production says windmills in the great lakes and ship their excess power far to say new york on a cloudy day, in short we still want to share power and the necessity to store and share the power is greater with intermittent renewables.
Say for example Egypt in 2030 is making a lot of solar power, it would be cheapest for it to pump it across a HVDC line to europe and sell it directly to europe, it would be more efficient and cheaper then say making hydrogen or using some other transportable energy system.
So yes we need to decentralized away from the centralized power stations and client model to a client and power source a one model, but we also want to connect these clients together to share power and negate the intermittent nature of their power sources and weaknesses of thier power portfolios, creating a power network that is very alien from the existing one.
In some ways the existing grid design can be easily modified into as smart grid, in other ways its going to have to be rebuild from the the ground up. As is the existing grid could withstand 15-30% intermittent renewable by switching off peaking stations when renewable are low. Electric cars can take up off-peak power from baseline power plants and latter could take up the extra power when renewables are high, and eventually when battery capacity is cheap enough act as grid storage devices, you might rent your electric cars battery out and say give X% of its capacity to the power company in exchange for reduce billing or even payment. Of course that is depend on large cheap battery capacity and a smart girding system, but it makes for the most achievable infrastructure models we could implement in the coming years.
So again its possible we can survive peak oil and continue to grow, the technology does exist its just a matter of making the infrastructure and effort, which at this time we seem to be doing with the same kind of enthusiasm as a man who is being forced to fuck an elephant.
Not to mention the fact that all the country's will be filling bankruptcy and restructuring in de mean time and this it self will slow things down considerable . People might even learn to get along in the dark ages of these information times of history . Ah Yeah we live in the past and are limited to the last person standing
Considering the trillions of barrels of unconventional oil available and now being mined to supplement drying up conventional oil supply: peak oil is the end of cheap oil, not the end of all oil, and to be technically we already peaked in 2008, and life still goes on mind you the economies of the world are significantly less stable they continue to run, thus fears that peak oil would end civilization as we know it are false.
The problem is what they don't talk about.
PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE
Just because they keep changing the way stuff looks does that make it more MODERN.
I haven't been to an auto show in 30 years. If some company started making what I regarded as an excellent car I would want to know what there was about it that could not have been manufactured 20 years ago.
Now we are near or maybe passed the point where more computing power can do most users any good. We need bloated inefficient software to waste processing power and force upgrades.
http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2010/02/the_computer_industry_is_makin.php
psik
I think we need to distinguish between "modernization" and "consumerism".
The more complex technology gets the more different ways it can be implemented and the less well consumers can evaluate it. So the corporations hire psychologists to figure out the dumb reasons people buy things and the stupidity is designed into the product.
So a truly excellent product does not sell and silly junk does. And the economics profession ignores the depreciation of the silly junk but calls it economic growth when more silly junk is purchased.
It is like computer are now at the point where stereo equipment was in the late 70s and cars were in the late 60s. A turbine car almost won the Indy 500 in 1968 but turbines were then banned from the race. What since does it make to ban the fastest technology?
How long do turbine engines last compared to piston jobs?
We need to change operating system every three years right?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5DCwN28y8o
Dual-core netbooks aren't powerful enough for grade school kids.
So if cars had lasted twice as long and cost half as much since the 60s, how many Americans could have had homes paid for by the 90s? But who suggests that accounting be mandatory in the schools?
psik
The more complex technology gets the more different ways it can be implemented and the less well consumers can evaluate it. So the corporations hire psychologists to figure out the dumb reasons people buy things and the stupidity is designed into the product.
So a truly excellent product does not sell and silly junk does. And the economics profession ignores the depreciation of the silly junk but calls it economic growth when more silly junk is purchased.
It is like computer are now at the point where stereo equipment was in the late 70s and cars were in the late 60s. A turbine car almost won the Indy 500 in 1968 but turbines were then banned from the race. What since does it make to ban the fastest technology?
How long do turbine engines last compared to piston jobs?
We need to change operating system every three years right?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5DCwN28y8o
Dual-core netbooks aren't powerful enough for grade school kids.
So if cars had lasted twice as long and cost half as much since the 60s, how many Americans could have had homes paid for by the 90s? But who suggests that accounting be mandatory in the schools?
psik
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
I'm violating my own rule by posting on a thread without reading every single post that came before, but a cursory examination indicates that you're not giving enough credit to the Paradigm Shift that you're living through, from the Industrial Revolution to the Electronic Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution was all about energy. Engines were invented that converted the chemical energy in fossil fuels into kinetic energy, so that the production of goods and services was no longer limited to the capacity of human energy, and to a lesser extent the energy of draft animals and a few water mills. No one at the time could have possibly foreseen what this would do to civilization: At the start, more than 99% of the population were doomed to "careers" in the production and distribution of food; today in the developed nations it's more like 3%. The other 97% of us are doing work that no one could have imagined 300 years ago, because the realms of knowledge, commerce, science, education, service, entertainment, etc., in which we work did not exist then.
The Electronic Revolution is all about information. The first telegraph two centuries ago converted information into electronic form for transmittal, but it took another century before we were able to store it permanently that way (magnetic tape) and another half century before large-scale storage became feasible (magnetic disks and now "readers" holding more information than a small library and a "cloud" containing almost everything.)
The effect of this revolution on civilization is only starting to be felt. There are already professions that would be impossible to describe to our great-grandfathers, such as "web designers." Entire corporations, such as Google and Apple, have sprung up that sell things Astor and Rockefeller could not understand.
Does any of us really think we can imagine the kinds of work that people will be doing in 100 years, or the effect it will have on politics, culture, the economy, and all the rest of civilization.
"Modernization" doesn't just mean new ways of making things. It means new things. And in the Post-Industrial Era, those "things" will be increasingly virtual, which means they are only limited by our imagination!
The Industrial Revolution was all about energy. Engines were invented that converted the chemical energy in fossil fuels into kinetic energy, so that the production of goods and services was no longer limited to the capacity of human energy, and to a lesser extent the energy of draft animals and a few water mills. No one at the time could have possibly foreseen what this would do to civilization: At the start, more than 99% of the population were doomed to "careers" in the production and distribution of food; today in the developed nations it's more like 3%. The other 97% of us are doing work that no one could have imagined 300 years ago, because the realms of knowledge, commerce, science, education, service, entertainment, etc., in which we work did not exist then.
The Electronic Revolution is all about information. The first telegraph two centuries ago converted information into electronic form for transmittal, but it took another century before we were able to store it permanently that way (magnetic tape) and another half century before large-scale storage became feasible (magnetic disks and now "readers" holding more information than a small library and a "cloud" containing almost everything.)
The effect of this revolution on civilization is only starting to be felt. There are already professions that would be impossible to describe to our great-grandfathers, such as "web designers." Entire corporations, such as Google and Apple, have sprung up that sell things Astor and Rockefeller could not understand.
Does any of us really think we can imagine the kinds of work that people will be doing in 100 years, or the effect it will have on politics, culture, the economy, and all the rest of civilization.
"Modernization" doesn't just mean new ways of making things. It means new things. And in the Post-Industrial Era, those "things" will be increasingly virtual, which means they are only limited by our imagination!
trucetheeker
Registered Member
In the UK (no doubt similar in the USA,) the immediate effect of industrialisation was to remove the livelihood of families whose main or only income was their handloom weaver trade and replace it with unemployed adults.
Here, Engels sets the stage:
So the poor bastards were getting along quite well for all they knew but as often happens, they were liberated from their ignorant slumbers by progress.
As you can see, just the invention of the jenny was enough to upset the applecart well and good but the real troubles had yet to begin. Eventually the good family life, clean air and pleasant surroundings give way to factory-supplied slum dwellings, insufficient wages to meet the families needs and an ever-present threat of being thrown out if the work dries up. To compound this situation, adult males and females find that they're unemployable:
It does get worse but I think I've made the point. Of course, that was 160 years and a lot has changed along the way. Or has it? Actually no! The game of monopoly continues but the impoverished tend to live in 3rd world countries or out of sight in the slums of 1st world countries. It's not so easy for most of us to recognise that the same disregard for humanity is still the norm in the global realm of industry and the pursuit of wealth.
It's hard to quantify but I can think of quite a number of these occupations that exist only to perpetuate the "system" without in any way enhancing our existence here on earth. In no specific order, that list includes advertisers, market researchers, bankers, investors, in fact the whole financial market industry, the stock exchanges of Wall Street, the City of London, etc, 90% of the medical and psychiatric professions, politicians and political parties and the Defense (sic) Industry.
I might seem like the "glass half empty" type of person but I can now recognise the wasted opportunity of humanity as money and greed have reduced us to haves and have nots.
You raise a good point, as most often you do, Fraggle.
The lynchpin of this revolution is the role of energy and it's supply, IMO. Until we can see our way to doing things with considerably less dependence on energy, I think the premise of this thread holds valid.
We cannot continue to use an ever increasing amount of energy without concerns for the consequences, many of which we cannot even guess at IMO.
We are at a pivotal point in our history, yet again, and it's going to be very interesting to observe how the virtual and three dimensional aspects of our lives interface and play out.
humanity has to unite . There is no other real choice . I know a lot of you have a hard time swallowing the blue pill , but face it monetary systems of war fair are what stops the human race from propelling to better destiny . It is a stumbling block . Better yet cock blocked by the pride of men . I am fucking all these women and you can piss up a rope mentality. I got that line from a porn Movie called Sodom and Gamora. That is my source so to speak
Mrs.Lucysnow
Valued Senior Member
Without China and India, Brazil and other countries growing and developing but with them....i don't know if we can say that there is enough oil for another 100 years. Saudi Arabia is not being honest about their reserves:
"The diplomatic cables from the U.S. embassy in Riyadh between 2007 and 2009 cite a former senior executive of Saudi Arabia's state-run Aramco oil company as revealing to American officials that the country's official estimate of 716 billion barrels of oil reserves is, well, hogwash; the real figure is about 40% lower than that, according to the oil executive, Sadad al-Husseini, a geologist who until 2004 headed Aramco's exploration department — a seemingly impeccable source. WikiLeaks released the four cables on Tuesday."
...Consider the implications: For years the Opec cartel of oil producing countries — of which Saudi Arabia is by far the most powerful member — as well as Western officials and oil traders have insisted that world will have enough oil for the foreseeable future. That's because Saudi Arabia was believed to be able to pump as much as 12.5 million barrels a day — and that it has "spare capacity" (a term frequently used by oil analysts) to pump on to the market quickly to fill any shortfall of supply from elsewhere caused by war, natural disasters or other unforeseen events. The Kingdom currently produces about 8 million barrels a day, ostensibly leaving it plenty more to release on to world markets at short notice...
But what if Saudi Arabia cannot pump enough oil to keep the world's oil supplies flowing smoothly and prices stable? Reading the WikiLeaks cables, that possibility seems real enough. Geologist Husseini told U.S. officials in Riyadh that world oil supplies could hit a peak "within five to 10 years" —in other words, by 2012 — "and will last some 15 years, until world oil production begins to decline," according to the 2007 Kincannon cable. If so, by next year the world could be producing as much oil as it will ever be able to do."
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2048242,00.html#ixzz1WXhByMXi
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