The Limits to Growth ...

Illustration by Maria Contreras

Prior to the rise of oil, the standard of living for the great majority of people on planet earth was marginal at best. As per Thomas Hobbes ... In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ 

Frontispiece of Leviathan by Abraham Bosse, with input from Hobbes

With advent of oil comes abundance ...

John Maynard Keynes once observed that dating from “say, to two thousand years before Christ—down to the beginning of the 18th century, there was no very great change in the standard of life of the average man living in the civilised centres of the earth. Ups and downs certainly. Visitations of plague, famine, and war. Golden intervals. But no progressive, violent change.” At best, he calculated, the average standard of living had no more than doubled in the previous four millennia, essentially because, when that epoch began, we already knew about fire, banking, the sail, the plow, mathematics; we learned little new that would have accelerated economic growth; and throughout that stretch the planet mostly ran on the muscles of people and animals, supplemented by the power of wind and water. Then, in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, we started to harness the combustion of coal, gas, and oil, and everything changed. That’s because a barrel of oil contains 5.8 million British thermal units’ worth of energy. Nate Hagens, the director of the Institute for the Study of Energy & Our Future, ran the numbers: “One barrel of oil has the same amount of energy of up to 25,000 hours of hard human labor, which is 12.5 years of work. At $20 per hour, this is $500,000 of labor per barrel.” A barrel of oil costs about seventy dollars at this week’s market price.

To call that energy revolution liberating hardly suffices. Suddenly, people could easily venture beyond their villages, or build dwellings large enough to afford some privacy, or stay up all night if they wanted to read. After four thousand years of economic stasis, we were suddenly in a world where the average standard of living doubled in a matter of decades, and then doubled again and again and again and again. And we liked it so much that it became the raison d’être of our political life. In the United States, the per-capita G.N.P. grew twenty-four per cent between 1947 and 1960, when Jack Kennedy, campaigning for President, pointed out that Russia’s growth rate was “three times as fast,” a gap he tried to narrow while in office. Between 1961 and 1965, the G.N.P. grew at a rate greater than five per cent a year, and the percentage of Americans living in poverty dropped by nearly half by the end of the decade. If there was anything Americans agreed on, it was that they wanted more, please. In the 1996 campaign, for instance, the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, Jack Kemp, demanded that we double the rate of growth, while Bill Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury, Larry Summers, said that we “cannot and will not accept any ‘speed limit’ on American economic growth. It is the task of economic policy to grow the economy.”

and cost ...

But a critique of growth was emerging in the postwar years as well, most concisely in a 1972 report commissioned by the Club of Rome titled “The Limits to Growth.” A team of M.I.T. economists used computer models (then something of a novelty) to show that, if we kept growing at the then-current rate, the planet could expect ecological collapse sometime toward the middle of the twenty-first century. That prediction turns out to have been spot-on: a report published in Nature on the last day of May concluded that we have already exceeded seven of eight “safe and just Earth system boundaries” that it studied—from groundwater supplies and fertilizer overuse to temperature. “We are moving in the wrong direction on basically all of these,” Johan Rockström, the paper’s lead author and the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told reporters. 

Click here to get Limits to Growth in PDF.

A prescient precursor - article 3600

Sunset/rev L

A prescient precursor of things to come was MIT's 1972 seminal work, The Limits to Growth, predicting what would happen if BAU (Business As Usual) i.e. capitalism, continued to exploit earth's resources with dire consequences coming to society beginning in the 2040s. Seems their prediction's spot on without question.

In 1972, a team of MIT scientists got together to study the risks of civilizational collapse. Their system dynamics model published by the Club of Rome identified impending ‘limits to growth’ (LtG) that meant industrial civilization was on track to collapse sometime within the 21st century, due to overexploitation of planetary resources.

According to a new peer-reviewed scientific report, industrial civilisation is likely to deplete its low-cost mineral resources within the next century, with debilitating impacts for the global economy and key infrastructures within the coming decade.

The study, the 33rd report to the Club of Rome, is authored by Prof Ugo Bardi of the University of Florence's Earth Sciences Department, and includes contributions from a wide range of senior scientists across relevant disciplines.

Planetary overshoot rules ... if we let it.

Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity’s demand for ecological resources and services in a given year exceeds what Earth can regenerate in that year.

In 2021, it falls on July 29.

Click here to see how the date was arrived at.

Click here to download The Limits to Growth PDF.

 

54 years later ...

Image by Noel Johnson. Data source: MIT World3 ‘Business as Usual’ model (Meadows et al., 1972).

A truly excellent article by Noel Johnson on Medium on the Limits to Growth brings back memories as I too wrote pieces on LTG back in 2021/3 echoing some of Johnson's thoughts about a 54 year old prediction proving out to be all too true in terms of accuracy most astounding in this writer's opinion.

Recently, I found myself gazing at a line graph that felt more like a mirror than a piece of data. It wasn’t a graph of last year’s inflation rate. It was a 1972 forecast of the future, shown on a computer model known as World3. This model was created by a group of MIT researchers working for the Club of Rome and was used in the authored book, The Limits To Growth.

When the world3 model was first introduced, the entire scientific community basically laughed at it. Most economists dismissed it as "Malthusian," and politicians ignored it. We had entered into a period of unprecedented economic expansion and the concept that there would be an end to this type of expansion seemed like a total buzzkill from another era.

Sunset/rev L

Yesterday, I viewed the recent update to this information. What was interesting to see was how well the chaos of the 2020s supply chain fragility, along with the increasing costs of raw materials and the overall sense that our global economy is beginning to sputter, was nothing short of predictable. In fact, if you look at it now, a decade ago we mapped out exactly where we’d be today. We aren’t drifting wildly through history. We’re tracking a decades old systems model with alarming accuracy.

Growth does not cease due to lack of creative solutions. Growth ceases due to increased resistance within the system. As we deplete resources with increasing ease of access, we are forced to expend greater amounts of both energy and capital to obtain each subsequent unit of production. This phenomenon is referred to as diminishing returns on investment.

Lastly.

This is the Innovation Trap. Technology is a means of directing energy and materials, not a miraculous source of energy. Advanced technology often requires more complexity, not less. Rarer minerals, more accurate production and a highly specialized international supply chain are all necessary. Each ‘solution’ we design adds a new layer of upkeep and a new set of dependencies.

Technology is quicker and more effective, it is also far more prone to malfunction when the surroundings change.

And we haven't even discussed global warming, habitat destruction or the impact of forever wars.

And so it goes -  K. Vonnegut.

The Limits to Growth ...

Some of the last homes currently being built in Oakley, Utah. The town has cut off new development because it doesn’t have enough water to go around.Credit...Lindsay D’Addato for The New York Times

In A Prescient Precursor, BRT discussed how forward thinking MIT's 1972 Limits to Growth truly was in terms of describing how business as usual was plundering earth's resources at an alarming rate. Well, a first salvo in proving this prediction to be true revolves around a small town known as Oakley, Utah thanks, in part, to global warming.

OAKLEY, Utah — The mountain spring that pioneers used to water their hayfields and now fills people’s taps flowed reliably into the old cowboy town of Oakley for decades. So when it dwindled to a trickle in this year’s scorching drought, officials took drastic action to preserve their water: They stopped building.

A harbinger of things to come?

So this spring, Oakley, about an hour’s drive east of Salt Lake City, imposed a construction moratorium on new homes that would connect to the town’s water system. It is one of the first towns in the United States to purposely stall growth for want of water in a new era of megadroughts. But it could be a harbinger of things to come in a hotter, drier West.

One never knows, do one? - Fats Waller

In the short term ...

A record number of super-sized tankers are now headed to the US. Photograph: ClassicStock/Alamy

In the short term, oil and renewables won. On the US & the Americas side, oil, on the Chinese side, solar but both winners will soon be eclipsed by the gorilla in the room, climate change as said entity ignores all borders as the world moves further into the 21st century.

In the open seas, an armada of empty tankers has quietly turned west. A record number of super-sized vessels are now heading to the US, where oil drillers and refineries are preparing to profit from Donald Trump’s war in the Middle East.

Almost 30 of these vessels, each able to hold 2m barrels of oil, are contracted to load US crude, destined for a global market facing the biggest supply crisis in history.

It is just over five years since the shale revolution made the US a net energy exporter and the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas. Now the White House is poised to strengthen its claim to an even greater share of the global oil market as the Middle East’s decades-long dominance is dismantled by war.

Guardian graphic. Source: The Oil & Gas Journal. Note: China and Taiwan and Sudan
and South Sudan are combined in the data. *Estimates for the Saudi Arabian-Kuwaiti Neutral Zone
are divided equally between the two countries

As doubts over the future market dominance of the Gulf’s petrostates deepen, the surge in market prices has begun fuelling the rise of the Americas. The growth in US and Canadian crude production – which has accelerated in recent years – is expected to continue through the 2020s. However, almost half of the world’s oil supply growth over the rest of the decade is expected to come from Latin America’s oil boom.

On the solar side, China dominates ...

China’s exports of solar capacity doubled to a record high of 68GW in the
first month of the Iran crisis alone. Photograph: AFP/Getty

China has long dominated the supply chains for the key building blocks of clean energy technologies, from wind turbines to solar panels and batteries. Beijing’s industrial prowess has helped the world’s biggest energy importer to capture between 60% and 85% of the world’s renewables market at a time when countries are preparing to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels.

As the world’s first “electrostate”, China stands in contrast with the White House pursuit of fossil fuel dominance. The country also stands to play a significant role in creating the new energy order.

“China derives strategic leverage from its leadership across renewables and electrification, manufacturing and innovation, domestic deployment and global exports,” said Ember, a climate and energy thinktank. “China is not merely manufacturing electrotech hardware, it is manufacturing an energy future in which it holds a commanding position.”

The crisis has meant the world’s greatest supplier of clean technologies is selling these components at record rates as countries prepare to cut their use of fossil fuels for good.

The intent for countries to leave oil for good is all well and good but long term implications regarding the intent to ameliorate global warming using said tech centers on undeniable facts regarding renewables and related factors impacting the spread and maintenance of same: 

• habitat destruction  
• environmental degradation
• resource depletion
• The limits to Growth

We are running out of planet.

Getty/Futurism

It's the water ... seems the inability to plan is not part of the plan when it comes to Corpus Christi, Texas.

A massive drought coupled with political mismanagement might fully deplete water in a major city: neither in West Asia nor the Horn of Africa, but in the United States of America. According to

Inside Climate News, the city of Corpus Christi, Texas could soon completely out of water in the next year. It’s the eighth largest city in Texas, and a major industrial node in the Gulf Coast. Its water infrastructure provides access to over 500,000 Texans, as well as the major chemical plants, oil facilities, and plastics factories which call the Gulf region home.

As Climate News notes, Corpus Christi is on track to be the first American city to completely run out of water, as its reservoirs near empty following a five-year drought. Though nobody can snap their fingers and end a drought, the extremely dry conditions follow decades of warnings that South Texas is posed for a water crisis.

Limits to growth/rev II

Children playing in the village square after school in Xiasha Village in Shenzhen, China, in November.Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

In May, 2021, a BRT blurb titled Long Term Time Bomb predicted the dire future of China vis a vis its declining population, something unable to be curtailed as many young Chinese people simply do not want children. The official start point of the decline now reads 1/17/23 but this is not the only depressing news as the population itself continues to age thanks to China's one child per family edict implemented to curb the country's population growth back in the day.

HONG KONG — The world’s most populous country has reached a pivotal moment: China’s population has begun to shrink, after a steady, yearslong decline in its birthrate that experts say is irreversible.

The government said on Tuesday that 9.56 million people were born in China last year, while 10.41 million people died. It was the first time deaths had outnumbered births in China since the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s failed economic experiment that led to widespread famine and death in the 1960s.

Chinese officials have tried for years to slow down the arrival of this moment, loosening a one-child policy and offering incentives to encourage families to have children. None of those policies worked. Now, facing a population decline, coupled with a long-running rise in life expectancy, the country is being thrust into a demographic crisis that will have consequences not just for China and its economy but for the world.

Researchers predict that the world's population will decline in the next 40 years due to declining birth rates — and it will cause a massive shortage of workers. Getty; Marianne Ayala/Insider

The economic and demographic forces that will lead to a global population drop by the end of the 21st century have been at work in major economies for a long time. Year after year, the birth rates of more rich and middle-income countries fall below the critical "replacement level" — the level at which people have enough children to maintain current population levels. A society needs 2.1 children per woman for the population to remain stable.  In the US, the current rate is 1.6 children per woman — and it's even lower in most European countries as well as Japan (1.3), China (1.2), and South Korea (0.8). Soon, almost every country in the world will fall below this breakeven point.

The end of economic growth is coming as declining populations will not be able to produce as much stuff as the world moves further into the 21st century. Sustainability is key is it not?

300/3000 ...

300/3000 ... = 300 blurbs in 2019, 3000 blurbs since 2007, something somewhat significant IMHO. What's even more significant is the fact you, my loyal readers, continue to read the musings of a senior citizen talking about all things related to science and tech and how both disciplines impact civilization 24/7.

This piece will not have links to sources more intelligent than said writer's (save 2) but rather personal takes on 2020, life in general and the issue of mortality as BRT has been fairly impersonal in its 12 years of existence inspired by a dear friend who said "You think you know a little bit so prove it." Hopefully I have and will continue to do so as there is simply too much happening to quit now in-spite of a world going mad as man moves ever forward into the 21st century. Note: this is a partial take at best.

The long decline

America is losing its mojo. From disastrous foreign policy endeavors beginning after WWII to the substitution of innovation in favor of money manipulation favoring the elite, the country's financial well being is being frittered away by greed (elimination of Glass-Stegall), incompetence and government corruption, not only in terms of tax code malfeasance favoring the rich but also with the fact there are no term limits, thus guaranteeing the pols never-ending quest for money in order to get re-elected no matter what the cost may be. This lack of term limits for the supremes also applies as this gives too much power to any sitting president in determining what political direction the country may go based on the kind of justice chosen for the job. Think Alito, Kavanaugh and Scalia for starters with Thomas in the wings.

The art of stupid

The educational construct in America is lacking to say the least and tech is one reason why this is so. Consider the smartphone and texting. In order to do this efficiently, newspeak is required due to the small form factor of the tech being used. This compression equation of newspeak ties in nicely with the use of emojis as showing one a happy face in social media equates to one-click while typing happy requires five. Expand this notion to writing whereby thought and the ability to tie together cogent thoughts necessitates taking the time and effort to make it happen, something starting to get rarer as AI is beginning to be used to replicate this valuable practice at speeds well beyond the ken of man. Endpaper. Nooze rules to sell ads and shape opinion. A lack of education makes the sell easy.

Thinking Elysium

The environment's unraveling, not only in terms of climate change but also in terms of environmental degradation and resource depletion, driven in large part by fossil fuel use, pollution and the impact of too many people living on planet earth. By 2050, the weakening polar vortex and jet stream, caused by global warming, will disrupt food production in unpredictable ways while intense drought and rising waters promise to displace millions, reminiscent of the film Elysium, a dystopian near-future view of mankind heading toward an abyss of our own making.

Technical incompetence & the denial of science

 All one has to do is listen to the president and congress talk tech to see just how blindingly ignorant these people truly are. The denial of science is even worse, not only in terms of the long term adverse effect it will have on the well being of the populace but also on the long term well being of the country. China has caught up to the US in terms of patents and computation and has surpassed the US in terms of developing rapid mass transit at a rate beyond anything this country has to offer. At the same time this is happening, the shortsighted view of never-ending growth and continued support of old industries like coal, fracking and drilling promise to accelerate the decline of the US while the rest of the world rapidly moves toward sustainables like wind, solar and wave. 

2020, politics & the end of the world

Politics, the art of lying and protecting the deep state of every country since the beginning of time, has reached its zenith (or nadir/take your pick) with the elections of far-right "populists" Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonro and Boris Johnson, provocateurs one and all, supporting the powers at be at all costs while the end of the world awaits thanks to climate change and the inability of nations to get their act together to ameliorate this existential threat to mankind. 

Regarding 2020, the Constitutional Crisis begins and ends with Trump with three questions silently moldering on the minds of thinking people everywhere ... 

1. The real 2016 Russigate ... How far will Barr and Durham go in their criminal proceedings?
2.  Will Trump leave if defeated? and ...
3. What will his hardcore followers do if Agent Orange is defeated?

On mortality

Gaff: It's a shame that she won't live, but then again, who does? - Blade Runner

Being a senior, yours truly thinks about mortality and ... the important things in one's life. 

To this writer it's

• Family. Having a son and his family close to my wife and me, rules. Ditto for two brothers and two sisters. On my wife's side, her niece's family rules.
• Friends, the close ones are truly rare indeed.
• Good art. You know, Miles, Shakespeare, Conrad, Twain, Carlin, Orwell, etc, etc, etc.
• Cartoons of all stripes :)
• Good coffee
• Good conversation
• Good wine & beer
• Pretty women - all ages :)
• Innovative tech
• Insightful science
• Good health
• Last but not least, having an open mind and the will to keep on moving :)

Any questions? :)

Beyond Logic

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don't much care where –" said Alice.

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

A must read from Smart Planet, America’s oil choice: Pay up, or get off  piece, written by Chris Nader, reminds me of the Cheshire Cat telling Alice how to "get there'.

The oil industry has an important message for you, America: You’re not paying enough for fuel. And if you want to realize the fantasy of “North American energy independence,” you will have to pay more for it — a lot more.

Getting drivers to go along with this notion will not be easy, so the industry has couched this message in much more careful language.

Its new media campaign began with a Feb. 5 editorial in the New York Times by Christof Rühl, group chief economist of BP. After claiming victory for optimists over peak oil pundits like me and trumpeting “North America’s oil and gas renaissance” — new “tight oil” production from shale formations like the Bakken in North Dakota and the Eagle Ford in Texas — Rühl explained how the “expected surge of new oil will lead to increased supply overall and continued market volatility.”

He wrote: “If history is any guide, OPEC will cut production and forego market share in favor of price stability.” (Emphasis mine.)

The United States and Canada have an important policy choice to make, Rühl asserted. “Nations with abundant resources must decide whether to follow the path of open markets, including foreign access and competitive pricing,” or “opt for restrictive investment regimes that risk becoming less rewarding.” (Emphasis mine.)

In other words, North American oil prices need to be higher. And the way to do that is to export crude to the rest of the world.

So let me guess. In order to keep the drilling, fracking and ongoing stripping of the Bakkan oil sands to continue, with disastrous environmental impact in hand, we have to export the toxic sludge, Dibit, under high pressure and high temperature from Canada through the US via the proposed XL pipeline for delivery to the wold in order to A. incur higher oil prices to continue doing the same old drilling, fracking and stripping and B. continue our dependence on fossil fuels supplied by foreign entities, right?

It gets better...

So I agree with Rühl, van der Hoeven and the experts cited by the Times: Crude prices would have to rise for the boom in unconventional oil and gas to continue. Their production growth has already slowed as prices have faltered.

But I disagree that the answer is to open up U.S. ports to crude oil exports. This isn’t really a principled argument about misalignment between resources and regulations, or open trade policy. It’s a strategic choice about whether or not the United States wants to remain committed to oil.

Instead of asking ourselves if we want more oil from increasingly dirty and environmentally damaging sources, we should be asking what kind of an economy we want.

From the standpoint of national security and the economy, it makes little sense to export crude oil and natural gas when the United States is still a net importer of both. (That’s right: Despite the ballyhooed boom in shale gas, the country still imports a net 6 percent of its gas.)

BRT has talked about the absurd relationship the US has with fossil fuel providers and has asked the simple question of why Germany is nearly 50% solar while the US is less then 2% even though Germany's climate is not as benign as ours. Without question, the US can get out of this ridiculous situation but in order to do that, a drastic reset needs to be done, the most important of which is to take back control of our government from the monied interests who are running this nation into the ground. Initial steps to start the process include:

• End Gerrymandering as this insures that incumbents remain in power.
• Amendment 28 whereby Congress must obey the laws it passes, terms limits and the elimination of lobbyists funneling money to the politicos in order fro them to get reelected, something not the case today.
• Leverage the net to enable public referendums on policies that affect us all. Iraq war as example
• Kill the Fed, the US had a revolution over the control of money, something we don't have as a cartel protected by government controls our money, not us.
• Demand transparency in finance and governance  We don't have that, thus we are being compromised without question.
• Institue public financing of campaigns and eliminate Citizens United as the last time yours truly checked, IBM is not a person.
• Eliminate the IRS and the byzantine tax codes (20,000 pages & counting) enabling the upper 1% to game the system. Replace it with something comprehensible and fair as the IRS works for the Fed to collect the interest on the money, our money, the Fed borrows in order to buy US Treasuries.

We must make these changes and then some before it's too late as earth is sending us a wake up call to change our ways or face the consequences, something we continue to ignore at our peril.

Any questions?

Becoming a bank ...

President Trump with Masayoshi Son, the chief executive of SoftBank, and Larry Ellison and Sam Altman after announcing Project Stargate on Jan. 21, 2025.Credit...Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

The pix says it all. Masayoshi Son helping Trump to walk, Ellison looking like the living dead and Altman,
a mere afterthought, comes to mind as Oracle is tanking as we speak regarding the vagaries of
AI and the ongoing reality of never ending debt.

On Jan. 21, 2025 — the first full day of the second Trump administration — Larry Ellison woke up in his 33-bedroom, 34-bathroom oceanfront mansion in Florida, got into his Gulfstream jet and headed up to Washington. Ellison, who was 80 and worth in the neighborhood of $200 billion, had an appointment at the White House. He didn’t bother to take a driver’s license — he needed to call someone on the president’s staff to vouch for him at the gate — but there he was, at 2 p.m., standing beside Donald Trump in the Roosevelt Room as the president announced “the largest A.I. infrastructure project by far in history” and told the world that his friend Larry Ellison was just the man to get it done. “He’s sort of C.E.O. of everything,” Trump said. “He’s an amazing man and an amazing businessperson.”

Ellison began by thanking Trump. “We certainly couldn’t do this without you,” he said. “It would simply be impossible.” He then proceeded to sketch out the ambitious plan. Ellison’s database software and cloud computing company, Oracle, and its partners — most prominently OpenAI — were going to invest as much as $500 billion over the next four years into a group of sprawling data centers, 500,000 square feet each, that would produce 10 gigawatts of computing power, using enough energy to power as many as 10 million homes. It was called Project Stargate, after the 1994 sci-fi movie in which Kurt Russell steps through a wormhole and finds himself inside a pyramid on an alien planet. This Stargate would be a portal leading humanity from the postindustrial era to the artificial-intelligence age.

Ellison did cash in, at least at first. He signed the Stargate deal with Altman, putting him in business with the hottest young executive in the A.I. industry. He opened one of the world’s largest data centers in Malaysia, which has provided by one estimate more than one-fifth of China’s A.I. computing power, and developed plans to build another one in the United Arab Emirates.

But his big bet on A.I. was built on an astronomical amount of debt in every imaginable form — bonds, letters of credit, asset-backed securities — available in seemingly unlimited quantities, because the more you spent building A.I. infrastructure, the more you would earn, or so the logic went. Computer theorists called it the scaling hypothesis. It held that advancements in A.I. were directly tied to the generation of unprecedented amounts of computing power to process unprecedented volumes of data. Reaching the holy grail of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., when computers match or surpass human thinking at any task, was going to require bigger data centers and a lot more of them. It all came down to capital expenditures — capex, in the lingo of the Valley. Whoever controlled the most computing power would control the A.I. economy.

Brendan McDermid/Reuters

A year and a half after his triumphant trip to the White House,
Ellison may be poised to become something else: a cautionary tale.

Ellison is personally worth about $55 billion less than he was on the morning he flew to Washington, and more than $200 billion less than he was at his peak in September. Oracle has pushed the limits of the credit market and is facing steeper interest rates from lenders, and its credit rating has been downgraded to a notch above “junk” status.

The hyperscalers — Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle — are some of the richest companies in the world, and the stock market is heavily dependent on them for its growth. If Oracle were to falter, the repercussions could be wide-ranging. Americans are more invested in the stock market than ever before, and the A.I. boom has been driving a disproportionate amount of America’s economic growth. Last fall, Gita Gopinath, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, writing in The Economist, estimated that an A.I. crash would wipe out $20 trillion in American wealth — far more than the dot-com crash in 2000 or even the 2008 financial crisis.

In closing ...

Oracle has ceased to be a technology licenser; it mutated into a law firm and a bank. Specifically, a subprime lender for un-renderable technology. Bankrolling OpenAI and chasing the scaling hypothesis is actively killing Ellison's company. Nothing personal, but crocodile tears apply. Remember, as per MIT, 95% of all AI projects fail.
The bubble is beginning to burst in real time. 

Thru the Looking Glass - Fragile vs. Robust ... A tiny sample :)

Through the Looking Glass - Fragile vs Robust

A tiny sample :)

Nature: Small periodic fires, started by lightning, clears away dead brush to permit new growth. Robust
Man: By trying to prevent fires of any kind insures the build-up of dead brush to biblical proportions, thus generating the distinct possibility of creating fires unable to be controlled. Channel CA in 2019. Fragile  

To assume is to err. Fragile

Monoculture farming vs 3 sisters.
Monoculture farming depletes soil and encourages insect pests. If a virus hits a monoculture garden, catastrophe ensues. Monsanto and its Bt gene fortified corn, designed to ward off the corn borer beetle, has failed as the beetle adapted. What does Monsanto do now besides enforcing patents on an increasingly compromised product? Fragile

The 3 sisters garden 
By the time European settlers arrived in America in the early 1600s, the Iroquois had been growing the “three sisters” for over three centuries. The vegetable trio sustained the Native Americans both physically and spiritually. In legend, the plants were a gift from the gods, always to be grown together, eaten together, and celebrated together. As older sisters often do, the corn offers the beans needed support. The beans, the giving sister, pull nitrogen from the air and bring it to the soil for the benefit of all three. As the beans grow through the tangle of squash vines and wind their way up the cornstalks into the sunlight, they hold the sisters close together. The large leaves of the sprawling squash protect the threesome by creating living mulch that shades the soil, keeping it cool and moist and preventing weeds. The prickly squash leaves also keep away raccoons and other pests, which don’t like to step on them. Together, the three sisters provide both sustainable soil fertility as well as a healthy diet. Perfection! Robust

The net, a chaotic, voluntary system based on open standards and redundancy, works. Robust

But there’s a problem. Like a road network, the Internet has its own highways and intersections that consist of cables and routers. The navigation system that manages the flow of data around the network is called the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). When you visit a website, BGP determines the best path through which the site’s data are to be transmitted to your device thanks to the redundancy of the web. It’s the shortest route solution It works well but ... BGP was designed only to be a temporary fix, a “good enough” solution when the Internet was rapidly growing in the late 1980s. If BGP is compromised, the web stops. i.e., Denial Of Services (DOS) Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled.[1] Man in the middle (MITM) In cryptography and computer security, a man-in-the-middle attack (MITM) is an attack where the attacker secretly relays and possibly alters the communications between two parties who believe that they are directly communicating with each other. Black holing In networking, black holes refer to places in the network where incoming or outgoing traffic is silently discarded (or “dropped”), without informing the source that the data did not reach its intended recipient. The black holes themselves are invisible, and can only be detected by monitoring the lost traffic.  Fragile

The supply chain driving the inherently complex production and distribution of smartphones must overcome numerous events able to disrupt the system in a myriad of ways including War, revolution, disease, weather, material shortages, manufacturing issues, truck breakdowns, traffic accidents, container ship mishaps, piracy, etc, etc, etc. Fragile.

Scientific experiments are inherently fragile in order to parse out the inner workings of nature. Discovering the constituent colors in light/Newton, The double-slit experiment/Young and Michelson & Morley accurately determining the speed of light. 

Keeping a teeter-totter perfectly balanced is hard as we all know. Fragile 

When a currency never varies, a slight change makes people crazy. Fragile 

Voltaire - Political systems equipped with periodic assassination gives rise to systems that renew themselves. Robust

Think the ossified 2 party system in the US as it’s always the same two parties without term limits. The system is paralyzed in its inability to improve. This ties in with lobbyists, the MIC, HC, Education and the continued subsidies given to big oil, big pharma & banks too big to fail. Dems over-regulate, the Repugs, under-regulate Fragile

The Athenians selected assemblies by lot. Robust

Top-down political systems are also not robust. Think dictators. Heavy-handed control gives rise to possible rebellion as said systems cannot adapt to the vagaries of society or reality in the long term unless you have the occasional assassination.  The French Revolution happened because the royals couldn’t meet the needs of the bourgeois. Fragile

Extreme and needless complexity defines the medical industry. Ditto government bureaucracy. Fragile

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished and ... she always finds a way. Robust

Computer tech, requiring power to run, is incredibly complex and ... its data, stored as magnetic 0s & 1s on hard drives and SSDs (Solid State Memory), digitally decays within 30 years.  If one bit is wrong, the program won’t work. Fragile

Acid-free fine paper, requiring no power to run, lasts over a thousand years. Think illuminated manuscripts. Robust

Religion, a system designed to be obeyed. Fragile Science, a system designed to be disproved. Robust

Forecasting of any kind is a guesstimate at best. Think Microsoft regarding the rise of the net. Fragile

Modern civilization, due to its extreme complexity, is fragile to the max.