[HN Gopher] The pivot
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The pivot
Author : AndrewDucker
Score : 90 points
Date : 2025-10-17 19:37 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.antipope.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.antipope.org)
| TMWNN wrote:
| >What we're seeing right now is the fossil fuel energy economy
| stopping. We need it to stop; if it doesn't stop, we're all going
| to starve to death within a generation or so.
|
| What are the odds that Stross said, wrote, or at least fervently
| believed the same thing c. 2000? Very high, I would bet.
| Bjartr wrote:
| I've always read the phrase "within a generation" to mean
| "within a generational lifespan", not "the time between groups
| we distinguish as distinct generations". Which is to say that
| under that interpretation it wouldn't be inconsistent to have
| believed it in both 2000 and 2025
| unholyguy001 wrote:
| I mean there is certainly tons of evidence that some fossil
| fuels (coal most notably) are on the way out. Fossil fuels as a
| class? Maybe but still a bit early to make that call
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| >>> an ongoing global pandemic vascular disease that is being
| systematically ignored by governments,
|
| Is that covid (vascular?) or something I have not heard of ?
| throwway120385 wrote:
| COVID is still out there and people still get sick with it and
| it's still having weird systemic effects in spite of our best
| efforts to ignore it.
| tartoran wrote:
| I think COVID is now considered endemic globally, it's more
| manageable than it was when it first broke out but it still
| causes deaths and weird after effects, probably not as many
| as before but will probably stay with us for some time to
| come.
| duncancarroll wrote:
| It's Covid. As someone who only recently recovered from Long
| Covid after a long, arduous 2-year fight, I see his point.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _(vascular?)_
|
| Not an expert, but from what I understood, SARS-Cov-2 infects
| cells through the ACE2 receptor that is present in all kinds of
| different cells along the blood vessels. It's "just"
| particularly present in the cells inside the lungs, which is
| why so many Covid patient could not take up enough oxygen
| anymore. But that somewhat nebulous "long tail" of other Covid
| symptoms is caused by the virus infecting other cells inside
| the body.
|
| So I guess that technically makes it a vascular and not a
| respiratory disease.
| baq wrote:
| It's been well established in 2020 already with Covid toes.
| blfr wrote:
| A very impressive number of prejudices strung along an attempt at
| a narrative around energy transition. Brings back the memories of
| usenet, where schizo posts were, unlike twitter, fairly long and
| glued together with something much like this.
|
| However, the transition actually driving the change in the world
| currently, absent from OP, is the demographic transition and
| migration. It started in France in the 18th century and is now
| hitting much of the world with no end in sight and virtually no
| unaffected populations. Dwarfs covid, PVs, or oil, which was
| largely solved anyway by fracking.
| stonogo wrote:
| What exactly is "the demographic transition" that's been
| apparently going on for three hundred years? Attempting to
| google this just results in a bunch of white supremacists
| refulgentis wrote:
| That's one of the ways [EDIT: s/white supremacists lure
| people in/they get ya], it's by far the predominant usage,
| but it's a bastardization of a term of art in the social
| sciences, essentially, a transition to a low death rate & low
| birth rate society from norm of high/high:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| That's how who gets who? I am having a real hard time
| trying to understand what you're attempting to communicate
| here.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| In the middle of 19th century France's elites birth rates
| plummeted. And it spread to the rest of the world in 20th.
| phyzome wrote:
| I'd recommend Wikipedia:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
| cyberax wrote:
| (The first) demographic transition is a normal term in
| political science. It just means the transition from mostly
| agricultural societies to mostly urban ones.
|
| It's associated with the drop in fertility, rise in life
| expectancy, etc.
|
| There are now people arguing that we're undergoing the second
| demographic transition.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _oil, which was largely solved anyway by fracking._
|
| I think you and OP disagree on what the actual problem with oil
| is.
| mcfunley wrote:
| Did HN start automatically translating posts from their
| original German?
| hamonrye wrote:
| > the geopolitics of the post-oil age
|
| Goddard called the West Germans "the generation of blue jeans and
| coca cola," wearing tricolor and driving manual transmission
| cars.
|
| The photovoltaic effect is whale oil for the modern age.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _The photovoltaic effect is whale oil for the modern age._
|
| What?
| clintonc wrote:
| Whale oil and solar panels both being signs of high status.
| lynguist wrote:
| I still don't understand.
|
| In actual history whale oil made airplane engines go (as
| lubricants) until the 1970s when they switched to
| synthetic.
|
| Most whales were killed in the 20th century to make planes
| go, not in the 19th to make city lights burn.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| TIL - yeah the 20C saw millions killed vs 19C and
| hundreds of thousands. I mean obviously that was
| industrialisation. Seems to be mostly meat, fats for
| cooking and a fair amount of TNT production - as well as
| lubricants for planes ...
|
| But in 1986 the whaling moratorium came in, and numbers
| killed have been hundreds or few thousand since.
|
| Yay Star Trek
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _Potable Water and Stable Coastlines have entered the chat_
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Ok - that was a doozy. Well done mr Stross. I'm going to have to
| chew on that for a while, but if there is one takeaway, it's we
| need what might be called "radical" solutions - which frankly are
| just "sensible - as long as your salary is not tied up in the
| status quo"
| nine_k wrote:
| In short: oil is soon to be over (because solar), Moore's law is
| dying (and has been for last 20 years), so the tech boom is soon
| to be over, so the elites of last 50-100 years are facing a wall
| ahead of them, and have little idea what to do. Hence bigger and
| bigger upheavals.
|
| Well, not that it's _completely_ wrong, but China and India only
| increase their oil consumption, and the US have just recently
| started to drill the local oil. It seems that oil is _very far_
| from over.
|
| The AI boom looks to me quite similar to the dotcom boom of 30
| years ago: we're certainly in a bubble, but that bubble is blown
| around some very real and powerful change. The bubble will burst
| (or maybe get deflated less dramatically), but the AI/ML stuff
| which is actually very useful will remain, and will continue
| developing.
|
| So, no. If there's a pivotal moment, it's not because of the oil
| and computers. It's more about elite production of last few
| decades, the universities, the business and political leaders,
| the effects of global social networks, the _discourses_ that
| permeate different social strata. But it 's a completely
| different kettle of fish.
| milesskorpen wrote:
| Yeah. He starts with reasonable points about the economy
| changing into the Electronic Era and then starts making
| increasingly less-evidenced points by the end.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I think it's possible to make a case both of you are right.
|
| These are huge globe changing effects being batted around.
| Solar is going to have an enormous effect - it's distributed at
| minimum. A lot of human domestic activity (billions of people)
| can go off grid. That's going to chnage politics in ways that's
| hard to understand
|
| Elite production (a term I always have concerns about - I
| prefer to say that the average school leaving age has moved
| from 16 when I was young to 21.)
|
| But elites, social media, balkanisation of social groupings
| (death of mass media) these also have huge effects.
|
| But the good news is this page on HN probably lists all of the
| giant freaking tidal waves - it's not an infinite challenge.
| But it is going to need radically different approaches to fix
| it.
|
| Luckily we have Democracy and Science - tattoo them on your
| knuckles folks - we got a fight ahead of us :-)
| gmuslera wrote:
| He wrote Accelerando, a book about everything happening faster,
| the mythical singularity would happen, after which everything
| will become increasingly better, increasingly faster. Now what we
| have is a pivot, after which everything will become increasingly
| worse, increasingly faster.
|
| At least the acceleration part will happen. And things will keep
| evolving. The pivot, the ones that decide that things are better
| or worse, are us. And probably for some of us (at least a
| extremely small minority, or that will die soon enough) the
| direction may keep going for better
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