Be kind! there was a terrible macaroni shortage for a few years.

It echoes. The best explanation for this phenomena seems to be that evolution is slow. It takes about 15K years for a mutation to spread through the population. So people, the 'cogs' of history are essentially the same now as at the dawn of civilization.

The biggest change we managed was the invention of writing and libraries. Before that we had civilizations being created and destroyed in a seemingly endless cycle of birth and death, starting from scratch every single time. These days the bits can crash and burn but the rest of the world carries on. Hungary is not much to write about these days but not so long ago it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a power in the old world. All that's left is a few tourist hot spots, salami, and goulash.

A couple of years ago I was fascinated by a reconstruction of the Antikythera Mechanism* which was made in 200 BC or so. It was depressing to think that the ancients actually built a device with enough precision to build Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. 2,000 years later that competence was not to be had.

On the bright side, the ancients wouldn't have had the tech to analyze the Antikythera Mechanism and now we do.

The world now works on many, many cylinders and hopefully they can't all shut down at once.

Once nice thing I see today is that the US is trying to shut China out of its tech stack, so China is developing its own. De novo tech stacks are superior to what they replace, the old stack caters to legacy tech and new stacks just ignore the legacy issue so they tend to be more efficient.

People who aren't in China or the US can pick and choose, mixing and matching (and interfacing) to their hearts' content.

I think we may have finally made civilization resilient enough to survive.

Interesting stuff.

*an advanced analog computer designed to assist in navigation.

If a Roman Legion intent on mayhem materialized in Manhattan it would be taken down by street cops in 10 minutes.

Duh? 2,000 years of arm race make the old guys obsolete. Ancient viruses and bacteria should not fare well against modern immune systems.

eia's Weekly Petroleum Status Report

I have argued for years that Peak Oil happened back in 2017. I posit that any perceived increase in demand since then is just China and India filling Strategic Petroleum Reserves and since that oil is not consumed I ignore it.

In the US average daily diesel consumption so far this year is 3.921 million barrels, 5 years ago it was 4.035 million barrels. Had Covid not happened this period would be considered a plateau preceding the inevitable collapse.

Amazon is spending $1 Billion to electrify its EU road delivery fleet. Shipping is a very competitive business so the rest of the industry is electrifying just as fast.

Most people seem to think oil demand goes up next year by 1-2 million bpd, I think it falls by about 1.5 million bpd.

That's true.

I've been a fan of science fiction since I was a kid. And science and tech generally. Not to mention a healthy respect for reality.

That reality thing should be paid attention to. The first crop of space mining companies had zero chance of working. There it was a scam to fleece investors.

New flash!!! The new generation of space mining companies is also a scam.

For space mining to ever take off we need space transportation costs to fall by a factor of 100, at minimum. We also need a single stage to LEO (and back!) space plane like the one in 2001.

Then we need a ton of infrastructure in space, starting with permanent L5 habitats and R&D labs. We need to figure out how to refine asteroids and comets into useful stuff in space. We need cheap in system transportation infrastructure, I like Dyson style nano swarms of space based solar panels that power masers that beam power to spaceships which are big clouds of rectennae to harvest that power and use it to run ion drives, no fuel!

We have about 50 years before space tourism gives way to industrialization.