10-Dec-12 World View -- Mauldin: state budgets under siege

Discussion of Web Log and Analysis topics from the Generational Dynamics web site.
John
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10-Dec-12 World View -- Mauldin: state budgets under siege

Post by John »

10-Dec-12 World View -- Mauldin: Looming crisis, state budgets soon to be under siege

Latest climate charge conference is an even greater farce than previous ones


** 10-Dec-12 World View -- Mauldin: Looming crisis, state budgets soon to be under siege
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi ... 10#e121210





Contents:
Venezuelan women openly weep as Hugo Chavez faces malignant cancer
Latest climate charge conference is an even greater farce than previous ones
Reviewing the 'Climate Change' issue
Arab League votes $100 million per month in aid to Palestinian Authority
Mauldin: Looming crisis, state budgets soon to be under siege


Keys:
Generational Dynamics, Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, climate change,
Loss and Damage Fund, Kyoto Protocol,
Arab League, Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority,
John Mauldin, Ed Easterling, Crestmont Research

OLD1953
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Re: 10-Dec-12 World View -- Mauldin: state budgets under sie

Post by OLD1953 »

Two sides to every argument, and Canada's wheat growing region is an interesting place to start.

http://www.nucleardarkness.org/warconse ... atgrowing/

Which is arguing that a 1 degree celsius drop in temps will reduce that growing area and we'll all starve. Wheat growing regions in Russia would be affected in a similar manner. If we are working to reverse climate change, won't we have a similar problem?

I'm irritated by the constant din of "we'll create a carbon trading system and it'll all be fine". That's not going to help. And for that matter, here's a graph you aren't likely to see at that conference.

https://www.google.com/publicdata/explo ... 0emissions

And something from Forbes.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampent ... r-decades/

I think we'll see greater drops than Forbes is projecting for three reasons, I expect population growth to continue to decline, I expect the movement of factories from China to the US to accelerate, and I expect the use of robotics to go up sharply in those factories as they are moved. That last one has a joker in it that few people consider, climate control for constant human presence is no longer required on a robotic factory floor. There is a huge quantity of energy expended on keeping factories within tolerable limits for humans, the limits for robots are part of the design phase and they can be designed for a much wider range and thus lessen energy expenses considerably. And of course that lessens CO2 emissions. And then there is this:

http://berc.berkeley.edu/is-the-us-abou ... l-targets/

We had as well be amused by life, otherwise we'll be crying all the time.

And there's a pretty good push on for more nuclear power and less coal. We are apt to see that worldwide CO2 decline begin in a couple of decades (sooner if India and China decide to nuke each other, over a 20 year period that's a possibility quite a bit above nil) and then we'll see some hair pulling about reduced food growing areas.

States and pension funds, oh my. It's funny to hear the political claims about state pensions, and they generally have about as much relationship to reality as the claims from corporations that boardroom decisions were made by union locals. It would take about ten minutes to fix the state pensions for all states, simply change the rules for disbursing monies to read that the total sum to be disbursed each year would not draw the fund down below the level required to ensure future payments based on standard acturial tables vs the age of the persons drawing, with fund earnings based off the average earnings of the fund for the previous ten years. That's trailing earnings applied to pension funds. Not exactly rocket science, but the states would cry and the pensioners would cry and the governor might not get reelected so his bid for the Senate would be spoiled.

So the states will try to throw it all to the federal government, doubtless while yelling they want less federal interference and more states rights. Kind of like my kids wanting the car keys but not wanting to tell me where they are going or how long they'll be gone. Like that works.

psCargile
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Re: 10-Dec-12 World View -- Mauldin: state budgets under sie

Post by psCargile »

What we need to do to stop climate change is stabilize the Earth's orbit by removing all other gravitational influences in the solar system and putting the Earth into the amount of energy flux we find acceptable. We also need to arrest preccession to set the axial tilt to one value (to be determined by the UN). And we need to control the output of the sun, either by rewritting the laws of nuclear physics, or directing unwanted energy elsewhere--say Mars, which could use a little more.

gerald
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Re: 10-Dec-12 World View -- Mauldin: state budgets under sie

Post by gerald »

psCargile wrote:What we need to do to stop climate change is stabilize the Earth's orbit by removing all other gravitational influences in the solar system and putting the Earth into the amount of energy flux we find acceptable. We also need to arrest preccession to set the axial tilt to one value (to be determined by the UN). And we need to control the output of the sun, either by rewritting the laws of nuclear physics, or directing unwanted energy elsewhere--say Mars, which could use a little more.
And we should also control the density of the galactic plasma at the heliospheric boundary ( it is beyond the orbit of Pluto ) that feeds the sun which determines the solar output .http://electric-cosmos.org/sun.htm

And things like this should also not be permitted ---

"Our present Pole Star, so long the epitome of stability, has been found to have brightened by 250 per cent over the past two millennia. And astronomers cannot explain why the anomalously rapid rate of increase. As Edward Guinan, an astronomer at Villanova University in Pennsylvania announced, 'It should not be getting that bright that fast. It's not behaving as expected. It's kind of scary.'" http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/ ... rpower.htm

John
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Re: 10-Dec-12 World View -- Mauldin: state budgets under sie

Post by John »

They can do all of that -- just pass a law. After all, that sort of
thing has been done successfully before:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZc2PNoCM2w

OLD1953
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Re: 10-Dec-12 World View -- Mauldin: state budgets under sie

Post by OLD1953 »

psCargile wrote:What we need to do to stop climate change is stabilize the Earth's orbit by removing all other gravitational influences in the solar system and putting the Earth into the amount of energy flux we find acceptable. We also need to arrest preccession to set the axial tilt to one value (to be determined by the UN). And we need to control the output of the sun, either by rewritting the laws of nuclear physics, or directing unwanted energy elsewhere--say Mars, which could use a little more.
That could be done, but it would take a while. Moving a planet without damaging it has been described as being similar to the old joke about getting off an elephant. "You don't get off an elephant, you get off a duck. Why? It's much safer."

To add the kinetic energy to a planet to move it in any real way, you'd never try to push the planet around directly. That would cause all kinds of problems, tides would flow to the side you pushed against, stresses would cause earthquakes, etc. Instead, you'd move an asteriod. Put some kind of engines on it large enough to balance its weight at whatever enormous height (tens of thousands of miles) you used to do this crazy stunt, and just push hard enough for it to "hover". There are caveats of course, you'd want it to actually fly around in a circle so engine failure wouldn't drop it on the planet but cause it to go into an eccentric orbit until the engines were fixed, etc. But essentially you put it in position where it would normally fall, and don't let it drop. Therefore, the planet has to "fall" towards the smaller body. This won't take as long to show results as you are thinking, an acceleration of 1 cm/sec/sec would put you near Pluto in 20 years, and I doubt you'd want to go that far or be in that much of a hurry. Since the coupling between the planet and the body with the engines on it is done by gravity, there would be no discernable effect on the planet, except that you'd notice the year starting to get longer pretty quickly, there'd be a lot of leap seconds being added and new days added to the calendar regularly.

I'm kind of joking of course, though there is no physical reason why such could not be done. Move the large earth sized moons of Jupiter and Saturn in closer to the Sun, put them in stable orbits and then you've got several planets ready for modifying to allow life to spread over their surfaces.

Also, it points up something I like to say, never ask an engineer about a science problem, never ask a scientist about an engineering problem, and always ask the guy who has experience in the correct field, a marine biologist knows about plankton, not fossils, an electrical engineer doesn't understand roads, etc. And never ask a lawyer or accountant for business advice.

Any of the above will give you the wrong answers to questions outside their field of expertise, and that's a big problem because they have this aura of respectability about anything they say due to their professions. You could easily find thousands of scientists and engineers who'd tell you all about how such a project was physically impossible, or would destroy the planet you were moving, even though it's easily provable that it would not and there's no reason to think such a thing impossible (impractical given human constraints perhaps, but that doesn't mean impossible). This is an issue that has caused me to quit watching TV interviews with scientists for the most part, because they constantly ask people questions totally unrelated to their area of expertise and the answers aren't any better than interviewing the man on the street.

And there are limits to known data. Astronomers are fairly up front about that, and papers are published constantly trying to refine that data to tighter and tighter limits. Right now, it is impossible to say with absolute certainty that the planets won't all collide and fall into the sun a few million years from now. That's the published limits of the data, and that got calculated up as three million years a while back. Nobody expects that, but data has limits and that's one way to express it. The application of that to the climate sciences is pretty obvious, they need better data and are slowly getting it, but not helped much by handwringers like Gore.

Chad

Re: 10-Dec-12 World View -- Mauldin: state budgets under sie

Post by Chad »

"In 1972, the "Club of Rome" published a report on the Limits of Growth that "scientists" had "proved" that within a few decades, the world would grind to a halt because of pollution. It turned out that they had reached their conclusions because of a bug in their Fortran program."

Rumors of "Limits to Growth" innaccuracies are greatly exaggerated: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/201 ... to-growth/

I'm not blaiming your "very long memory", the media is horrible at reporting scientific findings, and almost everyone believes the "Limits to Growth" report was proven wrong long ago when the truth is the report dosn't say the things most people think it does.

The scientists used computers to show how how population levels would react based on assumptions about resource usage, pollution, industrial output, and food production. For some reason, everyone was surprised when their models showed that exponential growth cannot continue on a world with finite resources. Despite running several scenarios under different assumptions and trying to be very clear that these were NOT predictions, people took the model's findings of "population levels may decrease sometime in the middle of the 21st century if current trends don't change" to mean "OMFG THE WORLD IS TOTALLY GOING TO END VERY SOON!!!!"

You, yourself, have showed several times over the years how food production per capita has been falling since the "green revolution" reached it's point of dimishing returns which is something that could have been "predicted" by the report!

I would have thought that someone who utilizes "system dynamics" would have more respect for one of the orginal uses of the concept and more empathy for being called "crazy" by people who don't understand what your model is actually "predicting".

John
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Re: 10-Dec-12 World View -- Mauldin: state budgets under sie

Post by John »

As a computer programmer myself, I have no criticism of the software,
and I certainly don't blame them because a decimal point was
mis-punched on a punched card Fortran program.

But I have little sympathy for the "Limits to Growth" authors who
became trapped by their own rhetoric. No matter what valid
statistical conclusions they may have reached, the fact that they
translated those conclusions into an anti-American political message
deserves condemnation. If you're going to use pseudo-science to
deliver an anti-American message, then you'd better be sure you don't
make any mistakes, or pro-American commentators like myself are going
to ridicule you. That's life.

The "Limits to Growth" concept is OK if stated as a mathematical
proposition, not as "proof' of the moral turpitude of America. I've
frequently written that the population is growing exponentially faster
than the food supply, and that this is going to lead to world war that
will kill some 3 billion people, leaving the population at around 4
billion. That's a message with no political content whatsoever, and
so nobody wants to hear it.

Now contrast my statement with what it says on the Club of Rome web site:
2052: What will the future hold?

Over the next 40 years the world population is likely to grow from
close to 7 billion to 8-10 billion (the estimates vary) people,
with a corresponding increase in demand for energy, land, water
and food, resulting possibly in a tripling of GDP. It is assumed
that the population will level off at around 8-10 billion in 2045
– a unique era in human history.

These developments are bound to further increase humanity’s
footprint and to reduce resilience in natural and social
systems. They even carry the potential of propelling us into an
unknown world, driven by non-linear processes, largely out of
human control.

How can we maximise our chances that, by 2052, in 40 years time,
we can look back and understand, that we have succeeded in
transiting into a fundamentally more sustainable, equitable and
peaceful world? By
  • Redefining the values which effectively guide the development
    of society
  • Developing a new economy, both in theory and practice, so that
    • natural and social capital are correctly valued
    • new financial markets deliver the goods and services
      mankind needs in and for a sustainable world
    • sufficient jobs are created to allow a decent income for all
  • Creating appropriate governance institutions on a global,
    national and local level
http://www.clubofrome.org/?p=2114
This is gobbledygook. "Redefining the values which effectively guide
the development of society"? This is total crap, and it's why I
criticize politicians, analysts and journalists all the time. The
entire Club of Rome analysis proves that the "non-linear processes"
are not just possible, but absolutely certain. And of course, the
most important non-linear process is a new world war, which they
essentially prove is coming, but they don't say that. Instead of
saying we're headed for a world war, they publish nonsense, and allow
it to get translated into an anti-American message.

When they start being a lot more honest about what's going on in the
world, then my opinion of them will change.

Beyond that, I just don't believe that computer models have any
validity beyond a few years. The 1972 Club of Rome computer model was
based on a world run by survivors of the Great Depression and WW
II, and a technology world where a typical computer filled an entire
room. Today the world is run by people who can't even find China on a
map, and computers fit in your pocket.

mannfm11
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Re: 10-Dec-12 World View -- Mauldin: state budgets under sie

Post by mannfm11 »

An active thread. As for Mauldin, I may have sent him an email in response to one of the articles he wrote, describing the broken stock market model and impossibility of pension funds making their returns back in 2003. I had deduced, by analyzing 130 years of data that the stock market wouldn't exceed the value reached in 2000 using anything near normal for maybe as long as 70 years. For one, the market was 300% of historical peak value and using a 1% to 1.5% compound real rate of growth, it wouldn't reach normal forever. Mauldin referred me to his book bullseye investing. Insufficient discount rates on the SPX indicated to me there wasn't any bullseye investing, only bullshit investing. Yeah, you might climb aboard the next AAPL or get in on the bottom of the next fake rocket, such as Netflix or Green Mountain Coffee. There were, in general, only bubbles. Today we are begged to buy AAPL and Facebook. DELL, Yahoo, INTC, CSCO, GE and MSFT were the must holds in 2000. The last 4 made up about 14% of the value of all stocks traded in the US and if you include dividends, not on of them has produced a positive return from its 2000 high. GE had to be bailed out with government financial guarantees.

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