53 Comments

1. Re Fertility on a global scale: I expect a major fail on explaining this, but it was said that anything worth doing is worth doing badly.
   Remember 1974 and ‘Limits to Growth’? or more specifically the computer program? Well I did an update starting by correcting for the energy. The last thing I tackled was global fertility.
   I was fine with the long term downward trend. Then it got to 1019/2020.
   At that point in time, when contraception had reached its limit, there was a step 10% decrease in global fertility.
   IIRC this brought peak population down from 10.6 Billion to 9.6 Billion circa 2076. I’m unsure if this is due to the vxx but if it is it will be a while before it unwinds.
   Already the UK is at 1.44 (Japan is at 1.4). And they want to fight a war?

2. John’s comments about the pro wrestlers having drinks at the bar after the rigged match struck me. I remember being mortified at seeing riots and downtown Raleigh burning with absolutely no response from either our Mayor or the Governor. It baffled me. Later it became obvious that the Raleigh riots waited until Richmond and other east coast cities had “their” riots and the paid actors could get in place. Meanwhile when conservative groups gathered, the police presence was robust and aggressive. The standards were so obviously different that it began to dawn on me that this was intentional. In this case, the objectives were I believe to encourage violence and lawlessness from some factions and blatant distrust in the rule of law from other factions.

   My question is how many of the mayors, governors etc on either side of the aisle do you think are aware the match is rigged and how many are just ideologues?

   1. Most know after a certain amount of time/experience. But there is wide variation in how much they know. What you see now in Europe is that they have made commitments to do what the New World Order leaders tell them to do – and they can not back out- doing so means they could be killed or thrown out in disgrace. But they know their populations know they have betrayed them and are not trustworthy. They are wiggling in their chains hoping somehow war is the answer.

3. Re: using fracking water for AI data center cooling: cooling systems distant from bodies of water large enough to function as a massive heat sink would most likely be evaporative in nature (think of those Venturi towers we’re all familiar with, with lots of steam pouring out the top). The cooling water in these systems has to be very clean, otherwise the dissolved solids in the water that remain after evaporation must be cleaned out or it will ruin the system. Fracking water is filthy, won’t do the trick. With the ocean cooling systems, there is a heat exchanger that keeps the water removing heat from the server racks in a closed system that passes through the larger, cooler open water body (the ocean) so there is minimal evaporation. In those cases I think the fracking water might be of some use, but it’s still filthy and would be far less efficient than purified water, requiring significant clean-out (though less than in evaporative systems) even in a closed loop cooling system.

   1. Forgot to mention that the warming impact would be significant locally, causing harm to marine ecosystems. Not sure how big a deal that is in China, but here in CA, we had a bunch of reliable, efficient, relatively clean natural gas generating plants located on the coast using “once-through cooling” systems (ocean water comes in cold, makes one pass through a closed-loop heat exchange system to pull heat away from turbine cooling water in the other closed circuit, then exits back to the ocean hot) that were shut down for – care to guess? – environmental reasons. Thankfully, there are massive “environmentally friendly” solar fields out in the middle of the desert, away from valuable coastal real estate, to make up the energy deficit (when the sun is shining, that is).

4. SENDING ALONG PRAYERS FOR TN

5. Ah, Oracle!

   Oracle’s valuation skyrocketed during the Y2K operation. I was an IT executive in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Y2K scare was used to push mid- to large-size businesses into enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems—often running on, you guessed it, Oracle databases. The two biggest ERP vendors were SAP and Oracle.

   Most of the systems I worked on during that period didn’t have a real Y2K issue and required only minor code changes to contend with the date issues. The ERP systems were clunky beasts that forced implementing companies to change their business processes to fit the ERP structure. The growth of ERPs also allowed backdoor access to large-scale corporate operations through Oracle databases.

   This operation was followed on by the dot-com bubble, which built the internet infrastructure that enabled corporate globalism. Once that technology was in place, the plug was pulled on the bubble; most companies crumbled, and those with any remaining value were picked up by the big players.

   1. Yup. The bubble emptied a lot of money out of the pension funds into the venture and private equity companies getting a rich exit on companies not worth anything.

6. Pumping stablecoin as the solution to a duct-taped financial system:

   Why I have to buy doughnuts with cash- FT

   https://archive.is/yfel5

   1. So even the FT is starting to get the practicality of cash.

7. Baker and Taylor is going bankrupt. Does anyone know it’s because of private equity. The article said no pension for the employees.

   1. Looks like the company employees bought the company in 2021 https://www.baker-taylor.com/article.cfm?topic=follett+sells+baker++taylor+to+bt+ceo&nid=307

      1. Maybe a victim of last friday’s 10th crypto’s flash crash?

Comments are closed.