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America Will Collapse by 2025 (2010)

salon.com

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Re: America Will Collapse by 2025 (2010)

#101

Post by wbsss4412 »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #94
logifail wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If push comes to shove and we (the US) devalue our currency [..] Against what, and by what means? (Perhaps naively) I'd always assumed the markets decide the exchange rates of (most) Western currencies against each other. Obviously with a dollop of central bank intervention here and there(!)

At the crudest level, what do you suppose would happen if the U.S. Treasury/Federal Reserve suddenly decide that every dollar-denominated account of $n got a "stimulus payment" of $2n?

That’s a very indirect way to devalue a currency for foreign exchange purposes. Sure, you’d be massively increasing that supply, but it’s doesn’t necessarily follow that said supply would flow directly into forex markets.

Re: America Will Collapse by 2025 (2010)

#102

Post by 300bps »

wcoenen wrote: post #82
300bps wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article's oil analysis is laughable in hindsight. Look at this chart: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc... Almost immediately after the article was written, US oil production hockey-sticked up to the point we were a net exporter of oil starting in 2020. The Salon analysis is actually hilarious against what actually happened.

This energy miracle may be a bit of a short lived illusion. The shift to fracking also resulted in a much lower EROEI (energy return on energy invested). Quote from [1]: > Two aspects of shale production make it radically different from conventional production. First, it takes a lot more energy (including many miles of steel tubing per well, for example) to extract energy out of these wells. Traditional wells have a…

I think this type of response should referred to as, "Refutation By Irrelevance".

In this case, Person A claimed that X will happen by Y date and Person B proved that literally the opposite happened by Y date.

Your response is to say that it may not be true by Z date. Which is all fine and good but not the point. It didn't help that you offered as proof a link to a web site that states it is "focused on the environment, social justice, indigenous rights and travel" that has an obvious bias against the thing that it is criticizing.

Re: America Will Collapse by 2025 (2010)

#103

Post by Clubber »

anonporridge wrote: post #54
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USSR had alternate models to move to. What alternate model does the US have? The only ones that are somewhat successful are Russian and Chinese style authoritarianism, neither of which are palatable to the US population.

The alternative style for the US is more loose confederation of independent states than tightly unified under a powerful federal government. This has literally been the key point of contention from just about day one.

Since before day one. Jefferson supported the former while Hamilton supported the later. This disagreement lead to the first political parties inside of GW's administration. This led to a dire warning in his farewell address:

"However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."

Re: America Will Collapse by 2025 (2010)

#104

Post by DesiLurker »

fallingknife wrote: post #22
coldtea wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I lol'd at this oil analysis. You really shouldn't tho. > The author had no idea what technological developments would be widely deployed in just the next couple years after they wrote this None of the technological developments created since then [2010] are able to mitigate an oil shock of the kind described in the article given their current deployment levels. Actually, not even any developments that might be cre…

Given that the US is now a net oil exporter, an oil shock scenario is pretty much off the table. Moving to EVs is going to take so much oil demand off the table that it's pretty much a non issue going forward too.

this is not even remotely true, the only reason US is a net oil exporter is because combination of high oil prices & cheap money has created an artificial support environment where unprofitable stuff like shale oil can survive. take some of these factors out and add demand destruction (even as low as 5%) from EVs and you are back to wildly fluctuating oil prices with no end in sight because every year the problem will be incrementally worse.

if there is one takeaway from all this it is there are very few oil producers that are profitab;e above $50/bbl and US ain't one of them.

Re: America Will Collapse by 2025 (2010)

#105

Post by jrs235 »

JavaBatman wrote: post #25

Even if we transition to a multipolar world order and renewed great power competition, America will still be the strongest and most secure global power. It has hegemony in the western hemisphere through its enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine; it is protected by the two largest oceans; it has historical, linguistic, and cultural ties to two regional powers on both sides of the ocean (UK and Ireland in Europe, Australi…

>America will still be the strongest and most secure global power.

>and most importantly, it has the strongest military by far.

"America" (The U.S.) will likely collapse from internal conflict, possibly precipitated or accompanied by external provocation (cyber warfare, infrastructure attacks, propaganda), that will divide the country and the military. Imagine the U.S. during the Civil War/War between the States. This time there won't be borders between the sides. How is a country facing such internal strife going to be able to control, let alone worry, about global affairs beyond it's borders?

Re: America Will Collapse by 2025 (2010)

#106

Post by coldtea »

300bps wrote: post #102
wcoenen wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This energy miracle may be a bit of a short lived illusion. The shift to fracking also resulted in a much lower EROEI (energy return on energy invested). Quote from [1]: > Two aspects of shale production make it radically different from conventional production. First, it takes a lot more energy (including many miles of steel tubing per well, for example) to extract energy out of these wells. Traditional wells have a…

I think this type of response should referred to as, "Refutation By Irrelevance". In this case, Person A claimed that X will happen by Y date and Person B proved that literally the opposite happened by Y date. Your response is to say that it may not be true by Z date. Which is all fine and good but not the point. It didn't help that you offered as proof a link to a web site that states it is "focused on the environme…

>I think this type of response should referred to as, "Refutation By Irrelevance". In this case, Person A claimed that X will happen by Y date and Person B proved that literally the opposite happened by Y date.

Or, you know, person A predicted something, and person B managed to avoid it by a kludgy short-lived workaround (that makes things worse, e.g. raises the price of gas to $3+ from it's 2014 price to now), and now people act as A's prediction is not a problem anymore because they want to believe...

Re: America Will Collapse by 2025 (2010)

#107

Post by y-c-o-m-b »

treespace88 wrote: post #33
sAbakumoff wrote: post #8

America will not collapse, but American democracy likely will collapse. At the end of 2022, GOP will win the mid-term elections and have the majority in the house and the senate. They already have state legislatures effectively under control, and the supreme court is full of conservative judges. In 2024 Ron De Santos, or another authoritarian candidate, will win the GOP nomination and easily win the election because…

I think it’s more likely the Democratic party collapses. They can’t seem to find a single thing to unify on.

"Conservative" literally means "averse to change" so of course they will always unify around a set of traditional beliefs.

The Democratic party has a harder time "unifying" because it's more accepting of change, but there is a wide spectrum of tolerance around how much and when people adapt to rapidly changing social and fiscal policies. Ultimately I think there is unification, but there's lag time for everyone to catch up and be on the same wavelength; a lag time of years, sometimes decades. This gives the perception of a disorganized party, but realistically it's more complicated than that.

Re: America Will Collapse by 2025 (2010)

#108

Post by chasd00 »

parkingrift wrote: post #34

>After years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in distant lands, in 2020, as long expected, the U.S. dollar finally loses its special status as the world's reserve currency. Suddenly, the cost of imports soars. Unable to pay for swelling deficits by selling now-devalued Treasury notes abroad, Washington is finally forced to slash its bloated military budget. It's funny and interesting that the military bu…

> ...and then, finally, we get to defense spending at $700B.

just a small reminder that $700B is less than the bank bailout of 2008/2009 which straddled both a Republican and Democrat president. That's in the top 5 most outrageous things in my lifetime (so far).

Re: America Will Collapse by 2025 (2010)

#109

Post by chasd00 »

DesiLurker wrote: post #104
fallingknife wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that the US is now a net oil exporter, an oil shock scenario is pretty much off the table. Moving to EVs is going to take so much oil demand off the table that it's pretty much a non issue going forward too.

this is not even remotely true, the only reason US is a net oil exporter is because combination of high oil prices & cheap money has created an artificial support environment where unprofitable stuff like shale oil can survive. take some of these factors out and add demand destruction (even as low as 5%) from EVs and you are back to wildly fluctuating oil prices with no end in sight because every year the problem wil…

isn't not being dependent on fossil fuels the goal? If EVs cause demand destruction for oil then that's good no? The more oil left unburned the better, i thought that was the point all along.

who cares about wildly fluctuating oil prices if your country is no longer dependent on oil.

Re: America Will Collapse by 2025 (2010)

#110

Post by chasd00 »

S_A_P wrote: post #11

Ahh the early days of clickbait. I wonder if the author was hoping to stop the demise or just wanted to be able to scream "see I told you so!" as the world burns.

i bet lunch that as soon as the author pressed the publish button they wrote another article under a different name title "Click to find out how that other guy is wrong and America won't collapse in 2025"
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