Hollow Men, Hollow Markets, Hollow World

Does the data set for the orange line in the chart get updated, monthly, quarterly or annually? (could you also link to the data set directly? Not sure I’m finding it exactly when I search on FRED)
I’m curious to see what the YTD damage has been so far in trying to forecast for the period ahead.

I’m also curious about the size and impact of crypto on this data set. To go from a $2trillion market cap at the beginning of January

to a market cap of about $882 billion currently is a pretty steep drop.

Granted, it is dwarfed by public, private and other markets but it is a non-zero contribution to what should be a declining orange line.

I guess I’m just looking for a silver lining in what an implied reversion to the mean looks like wealth wise.
Because the third outcome is a combination of both your scenarios - large wealth destruction AND wage/price controls and fiat policies. (A very dismal use of the AND philosophy to be sure). And it would be very grounding to be able to get any help in discerning between real alarm in the world and fake alarm from fiat world.

Point 1. Apocalypse Now - greatest movie of all time. The only reason it is second to Pulp Fiction on my favorite movies list is because Pulp Fiction is far less harrowing to watch (amazing they are referenced in the same note!). Even thinking of Martin Sheen’s line reading, “I don’t see any method…at all…sir” - haltingly because he is too bewildered by the encounter to do anything but tell the truth, but also aware that in this audience with a mad king who fancies himself a god, any word he utters might get him killed - gives me chills every time. The strange thing is, living in this insane world, where people have given themselves over to ridiculous narratives and worship of missionaries, I feel just like Willard in that moment when I tell people what I really think (not literally killed…yet) of the nonsense they apparently buy into.

Point 2. I’m sure many have seen this website, chronicling how myriad indicators of real productivity and growth abruptly stagnated as indicators of the paper wealth and the “hollow” economy took off starting around 1971 : https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ I’ll repeat my refrain that while these effects are often attributed to leaving the gold standard, and no longer having “sound” money, I think those are actually both the effects of increasingly restricted supply of cheap energy. Tim Garret of University of Utah has produced a series of papers directly linking economic growth and wealth production to the rate of increase in primary energy consumption as a matter of thermodynamics. https://twitter.com/nephologue/status/1537848492323876865

The idea is that, increasing the potential to harness untapped energy and resources and integrate them into organized networks of utility is, in a literal physical sense, what wealth production is. Producing wealth means either growing those networks or make them work faster and more interconnectedly, both of which require energy. If your ability to do that is limited or diminishing, you will not see real growth, although you may still see nominal growth.

If there is a large difference between the nominal and real GDP, it appears in economic accounts as high values of the GDP deflator or as hyperinflation. Interpreted physically, civilization dissipates energy along previously produced networks. Even as current production continues to grow these networks, there is concurrent fraying of those previously constructed that is sufficient to offset any productive gains.

In other words, when nominal growth exceeds the requisite level of primary energy consumption, this shows up as inflation (and probably other ‘hollow economy’ indicators). The US left the gold standard in '71, but consider also that it suffered severe energy supply shock lasting about a decade. What happened? Stagflation - high inflation, low real growth, the hollow economy really began then. Look at the pandemic. Primary energy consumption dropped precipitously as a matter of demand, then demand returns only tentatively due to latent pandemic related drag, combined with two absolutely titanic money bazookas - what followed? Massive inflation, Bitcoin → Bitcoin!™, stocks → Stonks!, crypto bubble, housing bubble, everything bubble.

This matters because EROEI of energy sources has been steadily falling for several decades, meaning the ability to increase primary energy consumption has been getting increasingly restricted. It was thought that we would hit peak oil in the 2000s, and while that was averted thanks to revolutionary innovations in tight oil and shale, output increased but EROEI did not improve nearly so much. And so we are still on a path to an ever-increasing proportion of energy having to be reinvested into future energy harvests, reducing the potential for real growth. This is terrible news, by the way, for so-called renewable energy sources by which might be the area where we are seeing perhaps the largest misallocation of capital in economic history. The only thing that could improve this situation is nuclear, or some yet undiscovered energy source (not energy carrier, which is what batteries and hydrogen cells are).

So, we have to recognize that the monetary policymakers have been playing a crooked game for the past few decades, especially the last one, but the reason they are doing that is perhaps because, as a matter of physics, it is the only game in town.

Point 3 This isn’t just a story about the wealthier sect ripping off the rest. There was massive amounts of fraud in the COVID assistance programs for rent and unemployment assistance from regular people. Many of the COVID rent protections and assistance did not actually require a person to declare that COVID had any effect on their life in any way. In New York it was basically a “get out of rent free” card, later ruled unconstitutional by the New York Court of Appeals as a taking. In some states the unemployment benefits could be and were utilized people who were not actually employed in the YEAR prior to the pandemic, and now the unemployment agencies are in a situation where they are trying to claw back money and demand something, anything to prove that you did in fact qualify for unemployment. Unfortunately certain political factions wanted to PREVENT the enaction of measures that might have mitigated this amount fraud waste and abuse.

What’s going on here is that, in an era of limited real growth, Malthusian competition effects are taking over. It’s okay to pretend fraud and abuse don’t exist, at least not among your constituents, because the pie isn’t growing and we’ve gotta do what we gotta do to get our piece. So we adopt whatever narrative suits us, and to hell with truth or sanity. And this really increases the risk of disastrous nationalization and price control policies.

My Answer There is a third way, between wealth destruction and disastrous economic management policies. We need massive investment in energy supply, first for fossil fuels supply increase, and deployment of nuclear and research into the discovery of new energy sources. This is the only way to repay what’s been stolen from the future without destroying what we have now. Or, maybe, another way of saying it is, this wouldn’t be stealing from the future the way we are now, but borrowing from it and in return creating greater growth potential for the future.

I’d also like to point everyone to a somewhat obscure work, Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies. He argues based on data from Roman Empire, the Mayans, and Chacoan Society of the American Southwest, and modern results, that the collapse of complex societies can be explained by the following:

1. human societies are problem-solving organizations;
2. sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance;
3. increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita; and
4. investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving response often reaches a point of diminishing marginal returns.

It is possible to speak of sociocultural evolution by the encompassing term ‘complexity,’ meaning by this the interlinked growth of the several subsystems comprise a society. This growth carries an associated energy cost, which before the development of fossil fuels was largely met by human labor. Growth also yields an array of benefits, including administration of resource storage and distribution, investment in agricultural, energy, and minerals production, internal order and external defense, information processing, and public works. …[A]t some point in the evolution of a society, continued investment complexity as a problem solving strategy yields a declining marginal return.

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(please forgive the previous owner’s markup)

Society begins to break down as

… [t]ax rates rise with less and less return to the local level. Irrigation systems go untended, bridges and roads are not kept up, and the frontier is not adequately defended. The population, meanwhile, must contribute ever more of a shrinking productive base to support whatever projects the hierarchy is still able to accomplish. Many of the social units that comprise a complex society perceive increased advantage to a strategy of independence, and begin to pursue their own immediate goals rather than the long-term goals of the hierarchy. Behavioral interdependence gives way to behavioral independence, requiring the hierarchy to allocate still more of a shrinking resource base to legitimization and/or control. Thus, when the marginal costs of participating in a complex society becomes too high, productive units across the economic spectrum increase resistance (passive or active) to the demands of the hierarchy, or overtly attempt to break away.

Most of the resistance from the non-ruling class will be passive. For example, “[i]n both the later Roman and Byzantine Empires, the overtaxed peasantry offered little resistance to the foreign incursions that ultimately toppled these regimes.”

That bold sentence I emphasized as especially disturbing given @bhunt’s comments on how the ruling class might choose to respond to the lack of real growth in the long term. He argues that one of the classic responses is temporary resurgences in state strength as they re-assert control at a new, higher level. These will be your strong leaders and authoritarians, but exercising increased power of course leads to greater complexity and imposition on the productive base of society, and only at best stalls the ultimate decline.

It’s not all doom and gloom though!

For human societies, the best key to continued socioeconomic growth, and to avoiding or circumventing (or at least financing) declines in marginal productivity, is to obtain a new energy subsidy when it becomes apparent that marginal productivity is beginning to drop. Among modern societies this has been accomplished by tapping fossil fuel reserves and the atom. Among societies without the technical springboard necessary for such development, the usual temptation is to acquire an energy subsidy through territorial expansion.

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So we need a new energy subsidy! We are tapping out fossil fuels, the atom is not fully tapped out yet, so we can increase reliance on that. No idea what the next new energy discovery will be.

Territorial expansion for the entire world economy is only possible through…interplanetary expansion and there’s some new energy source there? Maybe Elon is right about colonizing Mars and we really are at the beginning of a space travel revolution? That’s not where I thought reading this note would take me but…here we are.

Energy is Life

Love this. Thank you.

Great post, David. Thank you!

That’s my question too!

@bhunt I’d rather spend my time discussing artisanal mezcals, my current favorite is Del Amigo.
As I read I found myself saying, these are the waters that we swim. I expect stealing forward to infinity. It’s political suicide to allow the lines to converge. The largest voting block needs their portfolios to live. NGMI

Great post, Ben. After reading and digesting, and especially studying the hyperbolic separation of the curves of the financial vs. the real, I could not help but think of the similarities to the political worlds of the West.

The divergence between the Uniparty in power and the villagers in the developed world (think US, UK, Europe) could be graphed in a very similar fashion, I believe. In fact, they might overlay. Seems to me, the separation between the power elites and the proles has also gone hyperbolic.

Hard to see how it ends without authoritarian control (the political version of price controls).

Hail to the pack!

@david.c.billingsley

This is a marvelous contribution. Thank you. It reminds me of a small theory I cooked up one day while reading other peoples tedious ideas about why Mayans civilization declined.

The Guatemalan Highlands in particular have nurtured a vibrant Mayans civilization for many centuries. They have even managed to cope through the survival of their verbal traditions.

Here it is – as the priestly class in the cities of the Yucatán Peninsula grew more and more top-heavy, taxes became an ever heavier burden. For centuries the priests had contributed through their brilliant development of astrology to predict when to plant. In a region where the weather does not change that much that was a big advance. Over the centuries peasants gained enough experience that they could figure these things out for themselves. You count the moons, you count the days, you burn some incense, and hope for the best. Supplement that with offerings to whatever deity it is you think it might be helpful. Make a few offerings to the competition. Who knows which deity might actually help.that year? This is how Mayans still behave- pay a Mayan priest to sacrifice a chicken, then go say some prayers and burn candles at the Catholic Church if you don’t get results. And if you still don’t get results, swing by the evangelical church, sing loudly, and make a donation.

So maybe groups of peasants started moving away. If They got caught they could just say they were looking for more fertile fields.

It’s a simple theory – peasants wandered off because they did not want to support the priestly class anymore. It’s not really very different from the theory of Roman subjects on the frontiers offering no resistance to the Goths when they came through. It’s a soft “meh” and shrug by the producers in response to being overtaxed and underserved.

I have no data to validate this idea, nor do I need it. It’s a private musing by someone entirely sick of the overcomplexity of the scholarly class.

Many excellent points in the original post and in the ensuing discussion, I’ll add two things:

1. The reason log charts are useful is because they simplify discussion about integrated processes - and almost all measures of stock and most measures of flow are time series with I(1) or higher. Applying log-differences lets us talk about a stationary process, which behave in more predictable ways.
2. “Once the dust settles”, that is in the mid-term future once real rates are positive again and price inflation has abated, we’ll hear a lot more about defined-benefit plans. Defined contribution is all the rage in a “lower-for-longer” scenario where LT interest rates decline from double digits down to nil if not negative ; defined benefit might be considered very useful in the opposite scenario.

“And then we tell ourselves a new story”
Agreed.

I think the only way out is to Grow our way out.
No, I don’t mean more Stimulus via Government spending or Tax cuts or QE
They are all played out, wasted really.

I mean organic growth, using a unique strength of America, strength of our culture
That being a culture that’s inherently encouraging to individual endeavors for success and acceptable to individual failures .
We love individual rags to riches success stories and accept failures. We’re not Japan.

I think old fashioned free market capitalism is the best way out of a bad hand.
One way to accomplish that while utilizing our cultural resources is to have government policies fund and help any and all start-up businesses.
Take the money we currently give to our Oligopolies and Monopolies that have such influence over our government and fund start-ups

In the aggregate, it is start-ups that create the most efficiencies, produce the most non-inflationary growth, use the least debt to achieve. In the aggregate as there are many , many failures.
As an extra benefit, it gives hope and energy to the younger generations as
Nothing is more exhilarating than starting one’s own business.
As an additional benefit, start-up businesses can start chipping away at the economic power of the Oligopolies and Monopolies with the ancillary benefit of reducing their political power.

Let’s tell ourselves this “new” story , that free market capitalism works. And that the best form is creative destruction via new companies

Thanks for a really nice piece. It is a difficult thing to look at old reports and realize what you didn’t know. That takes a deep sense of self and remarkable ego strength.

I spent about an hour on the phone with a financial advisor yesterday; the conversation began with "what do I tell my clients when they say the dollar is going to be worthless?'. I felt a bit like Col. Jessup. The real truth (at least a bit of it) is that we have so seriously mismanaged the world since the fall of the Berlin Wall that we managed to bring defeat from a wonderous victory. My take is that after the Berlin Wall fell, America’s leadership decided it no longer needed to pay attention to the rabble; it went whole hog to efficiency at the cost of everything else to maximize “shareholder value”:. In that process, we destroyed our industrial base; the pandemic revealed how the lack of redundancy has left us in a dangerous position. It’s worth nothing that we thought it was OK to put the world’s most sophisticated semiconductor foundries in the range of China’s short-term missiles or base the entire German industrial machine on cheap Russian oil and gas. Or built retailers without stockrooms. Inflation becomes a real problem not just when there is too much money chasing too few goods but when I am not confident the goods will be there and thus I will pay any price.

So. what I told the advisor is that we are looking at a world of short duration assets, short business cycles, and really difficult financial markets. I don’t think he really heard it.

I have always been struck by John 5:1-8. The cripple at the well thought he knew what he needed; help to get in the pool if it stirred. Instead, Jesus showed him what he really needed, which was faith in him.

Thanks again, Ben.

I really enjoyed reading Ben’s Hollow ground and everyone’s post have greatly expanding the depth of my understanding!
Has anyone seen or done charts like Ben did for USA on China, Europe, etc…? Wondering if they have the same issues?

There is a defensiveness that presents itself in men of a certain age (read: Boomers) whenever you even hint at the notion that perhaps the vast wealth they’ve created was not entirely earned by pure genius and instead relied on a combination of skill, hard work, and being alive at the right time. They do not like to entertain the possibility that timing was as much of a factor as hard work was, because for whatever reason this is seen as a personal insult. Michael Kao (@UrbanKaoboy, a Twitter user I push relentlessly) has dubbed the post GFC era as ‘The Liquidity Lottery’, and I am each day ashamed that I didn’t think of that. It’s the perfect way to encapsulate what happened. Being alive during that time was useful. But being older and established was even better. For a huge chunk of the Baby Boomers the last ~13 years have coincided with the years that they have had the absolute peak amount with which to invest. An annualized return of ~12% does a lot more for the recently retired 62 year old with a huge IRA than it does for the 28 year old who’s setting aside 4% of her $42,000 salary. A rising tide lifts all ships, sure, but some of them had much taller masts when the tide came in.

Really enjoyed this one and the discussion - bummed to miss office hours today!

It feels that identifying as a villager is a bit of a cathartic function and I wonder if it’s a genesis moment as well. I wonder, and I’m sure the Pack has been contemplating this for some time now, where do we actually go from here? The conversation that Rafa brought up in last week’s office hours (in addition to some parts of the back and forth between Ben and Mike Green on Twitter), really speaks to the heart - and challenge - of this question, “what next”.

If I had to guess I imagine the next piece might speak to this more. But at the same time, this conversation is a clear reminder that the answer is really, really hard to find. Is there even an example of something that we can point to that has mass and potential? This thread is a good reminder that the answer is not the most important aspect. It’s the conversation and the journey to getting there that matters most.

I reckon it’s a lot harder to get the population to do less and be happy. For better or worse, consumption is the driver to our economy as well. Society can’t function if everyone’s meditating in the free time, the service industry would die.

You might get a lot of value out of Jacob Lund Fisker’s “Early Retirement Extreme” book (which he wrote after reasoning through the consequences of energy shortages)

Here’s a summary of this essay as a pop song, “Robber” by Weather Station:

The song (actually the whole album) was written about global warming, but your opinion on that makes no difference. The story is the same.

You never believed in the robber
You thought a robber must hate you
To wanna take from you
The robber don’t hate you
You never believed in the robber
But the robber never believed in you
You’re two halves of the same piece
Divided into two
No, the robber don’t hate you

“our lands were ravaged, we seek a new beginning”

Apocolypto (2006)

I think that you left off a third possibility in the potential responses to the widening gap between the increase of wealth and the increase in GDP. That would be the “do nothing” option or just let inflation continue at an ever increasing rate. I guess that one could argue that this option would eventually lead to wealth destruction also but it would be in a longer term.

I have also been thinking about your Conrad Lord Jim quote. Maybe in today’s context you could substitute the word “survive” for the word “live”. Because if your very survival is at stake one isn’t making lifestyle choices.

This “Hollow World” has really changed me. I have stopped getting angry (otherwise I would be angry almost all of the time). Now I just get disappointed. I don’t know what happens next after I stop getting disappointed. I have stopped putting a large effort into maintaining my economic standing. I am putting more effort into safeguarding my survival. It just seems that at some point soon, the narrative and the reality are going to separate so wildly that it will be impossible to ignore. It might happen in Europe this winter.

This was essentially what people thought prior to WWI. It turned out that the interconnectedness allowed one to stave off conflict, because there is a higher threshold to cross in the parties thinking a fight is worth it, but once the conflict does start, it creates a cascading effect that can be quite explosive.

This is surely a force in media that has siloed itself based on the audience it seeks to reach. I agree it is absolutely happening in politics and ET has spilled lots of ink on the approaches. Thinking about finding the big, well-run organization that has a charismatic leader is challenged by these very realities. If the organization was entrepreneurial and/or financially successful then the leader is almost certainly a centimillionaire. This is disqualifying for one tribe. If the leadership was shown in academia, union organization, or a career in public service then the other side has their sureties of where the allegiances are (not their side). Maybe a military backround could still pull from each side? I would reason that the spark of an idea/movement is a more likely source rather than the strength of a particular personality. I associate the American Revolution founders as men who carried a set of ideas forward and then became famous for taking the risk to execute on the vision.

I’ll repost what I wrote in another thread regarding energy scarcity:

Our society literally does not have a clue what energy scarcity really is. The only people that have a clue about this are those living in the poorest countries.

Energy scarcity is not just the electric bill doubling or tripling. It’s rolling blackouts, if you have a working electrical grid to begin with. There’s no supercomputer made in China and now in your pocket halfway across the world that you can somehow still afford, there are no data centers for them connect to with zero marginal cost. There are no container ships to block the Suez canal because it’s too difficult to manufacture cheap goods and stack them onto gargantuan ships which themselves can’t get across the ocean in any reasonable time. Actually cheap goods don’t exist. Energy scarcity is you make everything yourself or you pay gigantic prices for what you need but can’t make because everything is extremely labor or capital intensive. The service economy is literally servants in your household because there aren’t machines that run off petroleum and electricity to do all that manual labor you don’t want to do. Anyway nobody invented most of these things because science and technological innovation proceeds at only a fraction of the speed it has since the Industrial Revolution.

But in more direct answer to your question, there is basically a floor on the amount of energy that an advanced economy consumes. There are a couple reasons for this.

First, the more advanced/developed the economy, the more energy that is required to maintain it at its current level of functioning. Think of something infrastructural like the US interstate system. After inflation, I think it was $4 trillion of investment - the largest public works project in the history of civilization. There is no question that by making travel easier, faster, and more efficient for such a huge landmass unlocked enormous productive potential. However, this was not a one-time sunk cost. In order for travel on the interstate system to stay fast, easy, and efficient, it requires billions upon billions of dollars worth of ongoing maintenance every year. It probably easily pays for itself in dollars, but in energetic terms, our economy depends upon being able to continuously sink a certain amount of energy into its upkeep. Analogously, the Internet revolutionized so many things by reducing the marginal cost of information transfer and processing to nearly zero! But the data centers on which internet based technologies rely consume gargantuan amounts of energy to maintain 100% uptime and reliability. There is an estimate showing that your smartphone itself consumes a negligible amount of electricity unto itself, but streaming an hour of Netflix induces as much energy use in the network as a whole as your refrigerator does all year.

This leads to the second point, which is that, because the economy is so advanced, reductions in consumption or gains in efficiency in certain sectors of the economy do not lead to overall reductions in consumption throughout the rest of the economy. Sometimes, they actually induce greater consumption. This is because the system is interconnected enough that when some energy is freed up at one part of the system, another part of the system immediately starts to consume it.

This is best observed with the fact that, while carbon emissions in developed countries have fallen in the past 10-15 years, demand for fossil fuels in developing economies has been increasing as they grow and develop, and so carbon emissions in total continue to grow. So what you see is that, strictly within advanced economies, it is possible to reduce overall consumption without this effect - but only because there is very little marginal gain from increased consumption to be had within that economy. In the less developed economies, there is greater marginal gain.

Again, Garrett has argued in his publications that these are consequences of the principles of thermodynamics and not any particular social or economic arrangement. For these reasons, Garrett and others have argued that it isn’t really possible to maintain, let alone grow, the standard of living or wealth the world enjoys while significantly reducing energy consumption, or carbon emissions. See e.g., ESD - No way out? The double-bind in seeking global prosperity alongside mitigated climate change

The stranglehold robot man has over us terrifies me.

I haven’t read Garrett and know very little about energy. But the only way possible, in theory, would be for both developed and developing countries to go all-in for nuclear fission +/- renewables by mandate. Correct?

(I’m not implying this could ever actually happen.)

Looks like sugar cane biofuel is promising!!!

Ben: Your podcast w Hugh Hendry is a delight. I’ve always found his approach to the investing world most edifying and certainly is a different tone from what we’e used to here.

If you haven’t heard it, check it out. It’s worth the hour.

Roy

Roy

If that is the case, why does Congress and the Prez keep pushing it?

A chart from today in the TX power grid makes Patel1975’s point about renewables not being effective baseload capacity. Renewables have been key to keeping the supply here growing to keep up with demand- wind/solar add up to almost 30% of Texas’ rated capacity. The sun has a habit of not shining overnight and the wind speed drops off during the heat of a Texas afternoon.

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Natural gas is still roughly 40% of the fuel mix and is our baseload fuel. Check out how the rising price of natural gas has moved electricity prices in the Lone Star State! Seeing charts like this make it easier to see why Walmart sales are flagging.

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Seems like a mix of nuclear and renewables is the only answer.

Nuclear is the only ‘clean energy’ answer that makes any sense. Everything beyond that is a vanity project. Nat gas is easily the most logical bridge you’d use to get there over the next 10-15 years, but the neo-Malthusians won’t let that happen.

Wind is not a real solution. Outside of the coasts it’s not viable. Hell, the government has been fighting with itself for more than a decade trying to get a transmission line built from Wyoming to California. We are governed by morons, at every level, and there is zero chance that major projects could get done without wasting billions of dollars for bribes permits and years of waiting for bureaucrats to approve them. Most of the clean energy space is dominated by narratives that are detached from reality, and reality is, sadly, where we actually reside.

I believe the stat I saw said 500,000lbs of earth has to be moved in order to make one EV battery. Couple that with the millions of gallons of diesel that’s burned by mining equipment and your Tesla on net pollutes about the same as a comparable ICE vehicle.

Could you share , I would love to see it.

In the UK I built a solar farm in 2016, so I have some real world figures for you.

My panels are 1.67 x 1 metre and run in 600 volt dc strings.

I have been too busy to fit actuators to them , so there would be a significant gain to be had by tracking the sun (maybe +20%).

This is what I sold to the grid per panel:

2017- 251 kw/h
2018- 222 kw/h
2019- 261 kw/h
2020- 273 kw/h
2021- 254 kw/h

It is possible to use copper instead of silver in a solar panel.
Silver is used spread as a paste to conduct away from the silicon crystals.

Copper conducts electricity only slightly less well than silver. It is difficult to form into a thin film though.

If silver prices increased enough, copper sheet might replace it as a component in solar panel manufacture.

Thus spurring a rash of solar panel thefts. Pretty bad over here.

Excluding gold for obvious reasons, the next metal on the table of conductivity is aluminium and that has almost twice the resistance to a current so would need nearly twice the cross sectional area.

High voltage grid overhead transmission cables are aluminium alloy due to the relative weight between pylons.

It could be dangerous to mix aluminium cables with copper cables in a domestic setting due to the different thermal performances at the same amps and volts.
Mistaking an aluminium cable for a copper one of the same diameter could cause it to severely overheat.

Also in respect of silicon crystal backing for solar panels the heat cycle fatigue affect on the electrical contact bond would favour certain types of silicon materials and this would probably reduce possible efficiency.

Hi James

Yes I was aware of the use of aluminum for overhead transmission lines but was only speaking in terms of residential use. My knowledge comes from having “flipped” a couple of late 60’s single wall construction homes, referred to over here as plantation homes, many years ago and the contractor I was partners with insisted that we steer clear of aluminum wired homes as he was of the opinion that a number of house fires in Hawaii had been linked to such construction and that possibility would have a negative impact on resale value.

I was fishing for somebody that might know why the practice was discontinued back then with the hope that would have some bearing on this discussion of materials.

I do know aluminum wiring does not meet UBC at this time. But I don’t currently build, flip or have any other activities that would lead me to having useful knowledge beyond what I already offered.

I agree with several of the prior posts that GROWTH (via new energy sources or entrepreneurship) is the way out. Those posts imply a possibly positive vision of the future embedded in the thesis. There is a magazine I take (American Essence) that is full of stories past and present that honor ideals of the United States and people living them every day. While I do not want to say ‘meh’, neither do I want to buy the narrative that things are hopeless for Millenials, or that the Long Now is even inevitable, however likely it seems. Prepare for survival through all ethical means — but also be willing to lead and thrive during what is to come.

Growth is a siren song. We believe that if we just grow enough we will somehow grow out of this reality into another or something.

We need to understand that changes in scale (growth) result in changes in the fundamental properties of the systems we live in. Until then, we will keep growing ourselves into chaos and instability.

Perhaps safer to replace growth with development.

Purpose is the source of optimism for the younger generations. We have allowed the system to co-opt purpose to be about growth. Sustainability and a sense of belonging could be alternatives.

Said differently, I don’t believe that more of everything (including people) is a good thing for the world. I don’t want to go back to small hunter gatherer communities either. I just think there is a point of equilibrium where the benefits of growth outweigh the cost. I also think we are over that line and reacting to the consequences of the same.

Your post really resonates with me.

I am trying to complete some thoughts in my own mind after going home to Norway for a couple of weeks this summer. Using your terms, we should absolutely be wary of confusing the current establishment with the system. And while criticizing the establishment, we should remember that one of the most important strengths of the system was and is our strong belief in it, and our greater levels of trust in each other.

Trust is a much talked about but still under appreciated factor in successful civilizations. Trust both in your fellow citizens but also in the system and its institutions. When we gleefully attempt to tear down the current establishment (however good our reasons might be) we should be careful to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. And in this metaphor, the baby is democracy and civilization, with our current establishment playing the role of bathwater.

The Bank of Canada is joining the pedantry game. It’s not money printing, it’s just argle bargle highly technical zzzzzzz…

@bhunt There wouldn’t happen to be an updated version of the chart you posted now that we’ve gotten some destructive quarters to see how much farther we need to go to return to trend?