The Great Simplification - Full Movie

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It's 32 min 55 seconds, Nate Hagans putting his theories about economy and oil into an animated movie.

Effectively his concern is that as far as oil goes we have an unnaturally efficient fuel, of the sort that we're not likely to see again for a long time. He points out the cultural effects of the expedited technology, in something close to E.O. Wilson in that we haven't evolutionarily caught up to our conditions and most likely can't with the speed of change, that our structures are hijacking our dopaminergic systems to the degree that we're getting entrained into the economy in most aspects of our lives, and as far as I understand his view - as well as those of some of his recent guests - we're on the edge of having viable oil run out in the next few decades along with a lot of the minerals and metals that our green revolution is supposed to run on, ie. overall he's agreeing with the sort of world that John Michael Greer has talked about a lot in his peak oil and collapse books where we have a significant technological step backward just on sheer lack of cheep viable energy (not the 500 billion virtual workers Nate suggests have come as a result of of oil).

I love how this is Marx, Kaczynski, Thoreau, Lanier, Debord, the Club of Rome, and Lovelock, all in one, without using any of the words that trigger mental defenses like "neoliberal capitalism".

That's quite a divergent list of thinkers and philosophies (from each other).

I think I follow most of that though except I'm not as familiar with Club of Rome. Are they big 'limits of growth' sorts?

I posted this in the technology folder last Thursday but it was a discussion, in the series that movie is pinned to, where Dr. Simon Micheaux is getting into the limits of the materials and metals economy (pretty much blowing out most hope for renewables and nuclear equaling oil, coal, etc. once they're gone):

I know that this isn't helping, and exactly the mindsets that got us into this mess, but I'm getting older and worry about saving up for old age, and since I am in this global structure that I can't change, and which forces me into thinking about maximusing my own profit, regardless of the damage it does to others: I know I should find out how to and then invest in tungsten, tin and tantalite - the three metals electronics can't do without.

I've got a crazy - crazy - pipedream, meaning I'm a last year of Gen X, almost-millenial so the whole I idea that I'll be able to get a few million investing might be laughable. Just that if I can do it, and I can actually get enough information together and cross my fingers that there's a feasible building in my area (lets say a clean warehouse in one of the industrial parkways near me, no environmental survey issues) I'd love to start a vertical farm and geek out on my programming experience to see how I can optimize the LED lighting, censors, etc.. Obviously I'm not a botanist, not a farmer, so that part's kinda laughable but - I see cities having local vertical farms as critical going forward, especially if you can put enough solar panels on the roof to be as close to energy neutral as possible, get one of those Ambri calcium antimony batteries on premise - make sure everyone's getting their spinach, basil, and other greens fresh still even if the whole interstate supply chain becomes to expensive to keep up.

Also if the stoppage of Russian and Ukrainian grain exports is showing us anything - we want agricultural redundancy and granularity.

Another strange side note about investment - BTC's been carving a weird pseudo-square wave pattern for almost two weeks now between 29K and 30K. Looks like they're in the accrual phase for a big move up or down (I'm hoping down or either up then down) and I'm guessing they're holding it for the end of the month or waiting for Jerome Powell to say something crazy. I'm trying to get my LINK DCA sorted out though, should be interesting.

Friends of mine built a circular system with fishtanks in their office, where the wastewater would be used to fertilize the plants growing under LED lights.
It didn't work without issues the first year or so, but by year two, they had a lot of fish and tomatoes, fresh from the dark backroom of their office.
They are programners, too, and had no idea about fish or botanical skills before that. But they eventually stopped with this, because it was too much maintenance for a thing at the office, where, for example around christmas, there would no one be there for two weeks.
But on a ware house scale, you'd be producing on a scale where you need partners or employees or at least be seriously invested by yourself, so... I hope the opportunity arises and you can go for it.

And I hope Bitcoin finally crashes, because I'm not a programmer, but work in graphics, and I desperetaly need to upgrade my GPUs. Also, I want to try doing a thing with tensor flow, and right now, training ML algorithms, particularly something as old as tensor flow, is simply something I can't do on the GPUs I have.

It's within 10% now of full mining, which means a lot of the appeal in that direction will go away although Polkadot's getting a running start with their network so that could be the next hot place for the miners to run to.

Well I have been in the petroleum industry for years.I dont buy the claim that we will be out of oil in the next few decades.I drill and frack oil for a living .People will be fracking 100 years from now.My petroleum geologist friend said that they may be drilling in the ocean 1000 years from now but I would say we will prolly be out within the next 1000 years not the next few decades.I know this one company in Texas that drilled our wells has a 100 year drilling inventory that has not even been drilled yet.So I am not worried about oil and gas running out within my lifetime.

Yeah, the whole "the oil will run out"-story doesn't account for fracking, and if fracking were to be expanded globally, oil won't run out anytime soon. And a few countries, the USA, Canada, China and so on are doing that, while it was made illegal in parts of Europe.
The question of how we'll capture the additional CO2 and the chemicals pumped into the ground is unanswered, but I guess our societies are so helplessly addicted to burning hydrocarbons, we're willing to push that needle into that necrotized tissue and just wait for the end.

Nate had a second talk with Daniel Schmachtenberger and I think Daniel phrased something really well, and he said it in reference to the plow and the agricultural revolution, that game-changing technologies become obligate (implied that they do so based on multipolar traps). The same thing goes for high-yield energy sources.

I mentioned it in the comment on the original video, and now I'm wondering: do these guys ever explicitely say they are quoting the UNA-bomber manifesto, or are they just realizing this by themselves, now?
I mean, I guess if they mentioned Ted Kacynski, a lot of people would immediately shut down and stop listening, so even if they had read this, they better nor mention it, but I find it so odd.

Are you sure these ideas can't be arrived at independently if they measure against observation?

From my read of Kacynski he was a very intelligent guy but broken by trauma and that trauma, really experienced by way of the university system, turned him on to the idea that it was the purveyor of all evils in the world. I don't think either of these guys believe that, they - and Scott Alexander / Slate Star Codex you can throw in for good measure (read his 'Meditations on Moloch') - see multipolar traps as one of the central problems of civilization and it's not any wild leap to then see that certain technologies which give significant competitive advantage to those using them become an obligation if you want to participate in survival an the future. It just takes understanding Darwinian game theory and environment where technology is part of the environment.

^^ no, I'm sure you can reach conclusions quite similar to the odeas on the UNA-bomber manifesto, because it's quite clear Kacynski didn't come up with them himself. There's a lot of Henry David Thoreau in there, some actual Marx and some imaginary Marxists, etc.
It's stuff you can acquire by reading, and they, too, came up with it at some point, so it must be possible to reach these conclusions without having them read youreself before, obvs.

The advantage of having read them is the realization that there's a history and a discourse about them. People have probed the ideas to find holes in them.
And if you are familiar with the discourse, what these guys are discussing isn't wrong, so much as it feels like... Still very early in the discussion.

I get "no no, this is not what those hippies have been saying for 50 years, this time we came up with it"-vibes.
Just like with Sam Harris, who re-invents utilitarianism but no philosopher can discuss it with him because philosophers can't be asked to learn all his terminology only to tell him: "we've been here before, hundreds of years ago. Your idea is flawed, you can read up why for yourself"... Harris just hasn't read the books and decided to come up with a completely new thing.
So did Ayn Rand. She's a footnote for philosophy, because her idea of "always do the objective thing" is so trivial... Yet she's probably the most widely read "philosopher" in the world today...

I guess this is where I'd have to ask - you're implying that they'll essentially be forced along the same tracks if the ideas that they have really mature and they finally realize that they're just reinventing Hagel, or Kierkegaard, or someone else along those lines and didn't know it?

I ask this in the spirit that typically when I'm looking at these sort of things I tend to admire search for truth and you tend to, at least the way I read it often, see it as a sign of either naivety or having something else up their sleeves.

My own allergy to the idea that every realization forces the next that a person one hundred, two hundred, or even one thousand years ago had is that so much of this is really defined by personal limitations - ie. good or bad fortune, the various things that restrained their lives, restrained review of their work in their time from being adequately addressed and having it's strengths and weaknesses, it seems to me like a lot of the great names of philosophy had at least a few really good core ideas but they typically, at least as far as I can tell without exception, start off making a good deal of sense but then they'd get tackled by life and things would get rather novel based on what it was they were going through. I like the way Lev Shestov referred to this spreading effect when a man in his thirties or forties sees the world as clearly as the author of Ecclesiastes and see that it's perpetual cycles of pain, emptiness, and mendacity ever-unfolding by way of the insatiable human urge to copulate and when that understanding is reach - men go mad, alone, and close their authenticity down to the world under the realization that any authenticity is wasted on a world so deeply in the grips of Darwinian evolution.

I think if someone like Daniel Schmachtenberger keeps his telos as it is he might end up in a different place than a lot of the classics. Admittedly I can't say that I've sat with 700+ page tomes of Kant and the like but whenever I hear their work referenced it always seems very.... narrow, like it's addressing a very specific kind of problem, or when they do go generalist it still tends to be very idiocyncratic and it might feel like they started out with a good observation but then they did a whole bunch of self-referencing and ended up in a strange place (I especially find this with the Husserl enthusiasts I've run into who almost make a kind of secular Kabbalah out of his philosophy - they're each 'counting the nose-hairs of God' in different ways). On the other hand - when I read people like Shestov or Leopardi it feels way different, like their feet stayed on the ground and like their realizations, like Leopardi at the sports game, are profound in a useful rather than a 'head asplode!' bong-rip sense.

Regardless of what this is though, whether there are as many lines mathematically plumbed out or whether they have the degree of detachment and failure rate that I feel like I've seen most of the time, it's a HUGE space.

To that last point - are you familiar with John Vervaeke at all? He had a big lecture series on Youtube called 'Awakening from the Meaning Crisis' and for a lot the interviews I've seen one of his core interests is 'relevance realization' and our capacities to collapse almost infinite numbers of things we pay attention to down to those we can. I get the impression that the search space is big enough that we'll be mapping it for a long time. Could that be wishful thinking or optimism on my part? Sure, but I haven't seen clinching evidence, then again I've never seen anyone try to offer it, that we've chased every way of analyzing the world, analyzing people, analyzing problems, etc. to a point where there's little or nothing of value that hasn't already been said and that very little of it yields the desired results. I'd have to stay open-minded to that possibility but I've never seen anyone even try to make a compelling case for that. Big cosmologies or big guesses at future paths of evolution can end up smelling the same (for example many ideas in that area smell like De Chardin) but outside of how consciousness ultimately organizes itself in the universe there are all sort of small battles, of the sorts that vary from decade to decade, the problems are mostly the same but not in the same exact order of salience, for as little of Kierkegaard as I know he's often pulled out when people say that history never exactly repeats itself but it rhymes, and a lot of these guys are trying to grapple with what's going on right now and brainstorm if they can see a better path to 2030 or 2040 that isn't either free market running right off the rails or, to the opposite extreme, breaking a few million eggs to make an omelet.